The Cambridge Global History of Fashion: From the Nineteenth Century to the Present [2, 1 ed.] 9781108495554, 9781108862349, 9781108752657, 9781108495561

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the cambridge global history of fashion Volume II

Volume II surveys the history of fashion from the nineteenth-century to the present day. Covering the period beginning with mass industry and ending with calls for sustainability, this volume challenges the meaning of modernity and modernism from a global perspective and reflects on important scholarship that has changed our understanding of the relationship between fashion and colonialism. Empires shifted and new powers rose, with fashion marking and contending with this change. The volume concludes with a critical view of fashion and globalisation, and explores the deep connections between the fashion industry, the global economy, and the politics of production and wearing in the contemporary world. 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.

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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

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

volume ii Edited by

christopher breward National Museums Scotland

beverly lemire University of Alberta

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

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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/9781108495554 doi: 10.1017/9781108862349 © 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.

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CONTENTS FOR VOLUME II

page viii

List of Figures List of Maps List of Table

xvii xviii xix xxiii

List of Contributors Preface

part iv. fashion, modernism, and modernity

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21. Fashionable Masculinities in England and Beyond: Renunciation and Dandyism, 1800–1939 christopher breward 22. Fashion in Capitalism: Another Modernity, 1800 to the Present ulrich lehmann 23. Fashion and Youth in Western Societies: Street Style and Race, c. 1830–1940 vivienne richmond 24. Fashion and Time in China’s Twentieth

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Century

antonia finnane 25. The Totalitarian State and Fashion in the Twentieth Century djurdja

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890 bartlett 26. Hollywood and Beyond: Fashion and the Fiction Film stella bruzzi 934

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contents 27. Fashion and Non-Fashion Cultures 28. Fashion and Hypermodernity

sophie woodward 969 marco pecorari 994

part v. fashion, colonialism, and post-colonialism 29. Chinese Coolie Hats: Global Dialogues on a Sign of Servitude, c. 1840–1940 miki sugiura 30. Crumbling Empires and Emerging Nations: Fashion

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in Europe, c. 1860–1914

jonathan c. kaplanwajselbaum 31. Gender, Nation, Fashion, and Modernities in the Asia-Pacific, 1900 to the Present mina roces

1052 1091

32. The Global Politics of Wearing, Buying, and Selling European-Style Dress, c. 1900–1930 hissako anjo, emi goto, and miki sugiura 1123 33. Fashioning Diasporas: Jewish and African Experiences, c. 1800–1950 susan b. kaiser and nina l. cole 1155 34. Colonial Fashion Histories karen tranberg hansen

part vi. fashion systems and globalization

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35. Manufacturing Fashion in the Post-War Period ve´ ronique pouillard 36. Producing and Predicting Fashion in Twentieth-Century America and Europe regina lee blaszczyk

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37. The Origins and Development of Haute Couture, 1858 to Now claire wilcox 1292 38. Couture, Prêt-à-Porter, and Fast Fashion since 1945 simona segre reinach 1334 39. Casualwear and Its Birth in Japan

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toby slade

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contents 40. Fashion and Globalization: The Politics of Hijab liz bucar 41. Streetscape, Shop Window, Museum Vitrine: Displaying Fashion, c. 1800–2000 julia petrov 42. Fashion and Global Sustainability Index

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lucy norris

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FIGURES FOR VOLUME II

21.1 Eugène Atget, The Window of a Parisian Men’s Outfitters, photograph, 1926. page 739 21.2 James Tissot, The Circle of the Rue Royale, oil 741 on canvas, 1868. 21.3 Richard Dighton, A Portrait of George ‘Beau’ 746 Brummell, colour lithograph, later coloration, 1805. 21.4 Thomas Lawrence, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, 748 oil on canvas, 1804–9. 21.5 W. & D. Downey, Oscar Wilde, photograph, 1889. 752 21.6 Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Advertisement for 753 Arrow Collars & Shirts, c. 1925–30. 21.7 Man’s waistcoat, Spitalfields silk, London, 1830s. 755 21.8 David Hill and Robert Adamson, Mr Lane in Indian 756 Dress, calotype, c. 1845. 21.9 The Duke of York with the Earl of Strathmore’s 757 Shooting Party, Glamis Castle, Scotland, 1921. 21.10 A Scene from a Shanghai Dance 761 Club, photograph, 1926. 21.11 Jelly Roll Morton, Chicago, c. 1923. 764 23.1 F. S. Chanfrau in the character of ‘Mose’, 1848. 806 23.2 ‘William Brooks’, c. 1894. 808 23.3 ‘Tête en fer et Coineux, sortez votre couteau! Nous allons, en cinq sec, descendre un Proprio!’, 810 1902–10, postcard. 23.4 ‘At Sea’, c. 1832–9, print. 812 23.5 ‘Apaches en Jupons’, L’Œil de la Police, no. 6, 1908. 816

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23.6 ‘Les Apaches du Far-West’, 1907. 23.7 ‘Coast Race Riots Re-echo through State and Nation’, Los Angeles Times, 2 February 1930. 23.8 Publicity still of Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather, 1943. 23.9 Boys wearing looted formal wear, 2 August 1943. 23.10 ‘Police in Suits Arrest Kid in Zoot Suit’, 6 June 1943. 24.1 Chinese students wearing hanfu, Melbourne, 21 November 2018. 24.2 Qipao fashions, 1930–6. Cartoon by Changyan, Xiandai jiating, 1937. 24.3 Zhang Ailing in retro. 24.4 Manchu women in winter dress, Beijing, 1900. 24.5 Cartoon, 1910, depicting changes in the hairstyle among young men in Shanghai. 24.6 Chinese girl students, some time after 1910. 24.7 Jing Yufeng and Ma Xiuying, wearing Manchu costume to play Princess Iron Mirror. 24.8 The qipao as overcoat. Sketch by Chen Yingxia, 1922. 24.9 Graphic artist Ye Qianyu constructs a brief timeline of the qipao, 1924–7. 24.10 Ye Qianyu’s 1929 design for a figure-hugging qipao. 24.11 Lu Xiaoman and Tang Ying, ‘social influencers’ of the 1920s, 1927. 24.12 ‘The Evolution of Dress’. Cartoon by Yufei, 1947. 24.13 1949: end of the reactionary era? 24.14 Holiday photos in Shanghai during the Mao years. 24.15 Pattern books from the Mao years. 24.16 Early 1980s studio photo of woman wearing a qipao. 24.17 Sincere Department Store, 16 September 2009. 24.18 Exhibit by haute couturier Guo Pei. 24.19 The 1926 fashion show. Sketch by Roberta Patterson. 25.1 Modeli sezona (Fashions of the Seasons), Moscow, 1938–9. 25.2 Catalogue, the Leningrad Rot Front Fur Company, 1936–7. 25.3 Nõk lapja (Women’s Journal), Budapest, 1952.

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25.4 Žena a móda (Woman and Fashion), Prague, 1953. 904 25.5 Žena a móda (Woman and Fashion), Prague, 1952. 905 25.6 Sovetskaiia zhenschina (Soviet Woman), Moscow, 907 1946. 25.7 ‘New Suit’. Designer Iulia Denisova, Zhurnal mod 910 (Fashion Journal), Moscow, 1968. 25.8 Slava Zaitsev with his models, Soviet Export, 911 Moscow, 1975. 25.9 Moda Polska: Ty i ja (You and I), Warsaw, 1969. 915 25.10 Bormann Magdeburg dress design, Sibylle, East Berlin, 917 1956. 25.11 ‘Raw Silk’, Zhurnal mod (Fashion Journal), Moscow, 927 1961. 26.1 Marlene Dietrich in the film Morocco by Josef von 938 Sternberg, 1930. 26.2 Joan Crawford in Letty Lynton by Clarence Brown, 1932. 939 26.3 James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause by Nicholas 945 Ray, 1955. 26.4 Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night by Norman Jewison, 1967. 948 26.5 Pam Grier in Foxy Brown by Jack Hill, 1974. 949 26.6 Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir, 1975. 952 26.7 Stacey Dash and Alicia Silverstone in Clueless 958 by Amy Heckerling, 1995. 26.8 Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love by 961 Wong Kar-Wai, 2000. 27.1 Young woman creates images of hijab fashion. 975 27.2 Selecting items from a second-hand clothing store. 980 27.3 Normcore: young woman wearing plain clothing 982 that is not visibly branded. 27.4 Ripped jeans as a fashionable aesthetic. 988 27.5 Mom jeans. Published 3 January 2020 990 by Barbora Polednová. 29.1 The making of Screwpine imitation Panama hats, 1028 Taiwan, 1915.

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list of figures

29.2 Coolies illustrated in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1864. 29.3 Chinese labourers at a railway construction site, 1863–9 or 1886. 29.4 Chinese labourers laying the last rail of the first transcontinental railroad, 10 May 1869. 29.5 Chinese Labour Corps at a roll-call in France during the First Word War. 29.6 Illustration of Chinese labourers’ hats. 29.7 Battery Road, Singapore, c. 1930. 29.8 Poster for ‘Taiwanese hats, the hats of Asia’, 1943. 30.1 Portrait of Tache I. Bilciurescu and Anastasia Vasile Zănescu by Atelier Charles Szathmari, Bucharest, c. 1860s. 30.2 Portrait of young men from unidentified family album by J. Kunzfeld, Brünn, undated. 30.3 Fashion plate by V. Katzler, published in Wiener Moden Zeitung (1863). 30.4 Fashion plate by V. Katzler, published in Wiener Moden Zeitung (1862). 30.5 Portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph I and Crown Prince Rudolf by Victor Angerer, c. 1865. 30.6 Advertisement for F. Turczynski (Vienna), published in Der Gebirgsfreund (1897). 30.7 Advertisement for M. Arnstein’s Zagreb boutique Englezki Magazin, published in Agramer Zeitung, 1895. 30.8 Portrait of a girl dressed in the costume of Herrestad or Järrestad in Skåne County by Gösta Florman, c. 1870–1900. 30.9 Portrait of unknown man in czamara and konfederatka cap by Karol Beyer, Warsaw, c. 1863. 30.10 Embroidery and lace examples on shawls and blouses depicted in Magazyn Mód, 1861. 30.11 Fashion plate from Tygodnik Mód, 1887. 30.12 Portrait of Secessionist painter Mileva Roller by Atelier Madame d’Ora, Vienna, 1908.

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30.13 Two women wearing tea gowns designed by Henry van de Velde, published in Deutsche Kunst 1087 und Dekoration, 1902. 31.1 Senator Grace Poe wearing an off-white formal terno, 1093 2014. 31.2 Movie actress Heart Evangelista, 2014. 1094 31.3 Portrait of the Thai royal family painted 1100 by Odoardo Gelli in 1899. 31.4 Emperor Meiji in 1873 in Western dress typical of 1102 European monarchs. 31.5 Empress Shoken (Haruko) in Western formal dress. 1103 31.6 Mohandas K. Gandhi attired in a loincloth spinning 1108 khadi (homespun cloth), late 1940s. 31.7 A scene from the ballet The Red Detachment 1111 of Women, 1972. 31.8 Anime cosplay from Harajuku district in Tokyo, Japan – an example of ‘cute fashion’ (kawaii), 2015. 1117 32.1 Egyptian women participating in one of 1132 the marches during April 1919. 32.2 Huda Shaarawi, Saiza Nabrawi, and Nabawiya Musa lifting face veils in Roma in 1923. 1133 32.3 White-collar workers on their way home, Japan, 1929. 1138 32.4 ‘The Perfect Figure’. 1140 32.5 A single-breasted sack suit and a double-breasted 1141 sack suit ‘in style’. 32.6 Crowd at Nairobi station taken by a member of the 1145 Japanese consulate in 1926. 32.7 Railway station Nairobi, British East Africa, c. 1145 1910–20s. 32.8 Market scene at Fort Portal, Uganda, in 1936. 1147 33.1 Jewish tailors’ workshop in the East End of London, 1163 c. 1910–14. 33.2 Shirtwaist workers in an East Coast United States 1166 garment shop, c. 1900–10. 33.3 Women shirtwaist strikers in New York, 1910. 1168 33.4 ‘Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich’ exhibition at 1172 the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, 2019.

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33.5 African Americans outside a Georgia church, 1177 c. 1900. 33.6 South African-born, internationally renowned singer Miriam Makeba in the RCA recording 1184 studios in New York City, c. 1965. 33.7 Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie I greets a Rastafari 1185 delegation in Kingston, Jamaica, 1966. 34.1 Herero women wearing ‘long’ dresses during troop 1199 parade in Swakopmund, Namibia, 1995. 34.2 Women in traje de baiana and the author as 1206 tourist in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, 2002. 34.3 ‘Hands and Fingers’ design on textile purchased 1212 in southern Tanzania, 2009. 34.4 Wedding party on the road in Southern Province, 1215 Zambia, 2001. 35.1 Garment tenement building at Elizabeth Street, Lower East Side, New York, 1912. 1226 35.2 An Italian woman sewing in an unidentified factory, 1227 possibly New York City, c. 1930. 35.3 A cutter in the Cooperative Garment Factory at Jersey Homesteads, 1936. 1228 35.4 A workshop in the Sepal Group largescale factory producing clothing for American clothing 1244 companies, November 2018. 36.1 Activists in the civil rights movement, Washington, 1250 1963. 36.2 The entrepreneur John Wanamaker, 1911. 1254 36.3 The Gibson Girl image, 1905. 1255 36.4 Middle-class shoppers at one of John Wanamaker’s 1259 stores in central Philadelphia, 1870s. 36.5 Nicholsons Ltd, 1911. 1264 36.6 Shade card from the dye houses in the French textile 1266 manufacturing district of Lyon, 1899. 36.7 Ready-to-wear dress in British rayon fabric. Utility 1270 clothing scheme between 1941 and 1952. 36.8 DuPont displayed nylon at the world’s fairs in San 1271 Francisco in 1938 and New York in 1939–40.

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list of figures

36.9 Christian Dior ensemble for spring 1960. 36.10 Advertisement for ‘the many looks of Bobby Brooks’, Glamour magazine, August 1964. 36.11 Penneys catalogue, Fall–Winter 1967. 37.1 Charles Frederick Worth, detail of label in dress made for the imperial Russian court, c. 1888. 37.2 Jean Béraud, Workers Leaving the House of Paquin, rue de la Paix, Paris, c. 1900. 37.3 Charles Frederick Worth, Wedding Dress, embroidered satin and velvet, Paris and London, 1879–80. 37.4 James Tissot, The Ball, 1878. 37.5 House of Worth, Evening Dress, Paris, 1893. 37.6 Paul Poiret, theatre costume for Jacques Richepin’s The Minaret, Paris, 1913. 37.7 Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, Paris, 30 May 1929. 37.8 Cecil Beaton, ‘The Duchess of Windsor’, British Vogue, 9 June 1937. 37.9 Cristóbal Balenciaga, evening dress and cape, Paris, 1967. 37.10 Christian Dior, ‘Bar’ suit ‘La Ligne Corolle’, Paris 1947 (designed), 1955 (made). 37.11 Madeleine Vionnet, evening dress ‘Coq de Roche’, Paris, 1935. 37.12 Christian Dior, haute couture show Autumn/ Winter 2021/2022, Paris, 5 July 2021. 38.1 Portrait of Giorgio Armani, 1979. 38.2 Portrait of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, 1995. 38.3 Miuccia Prada walks the runway during the Prada Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2020–1 fashion show. 38.4 Dries Van Noten, Spring/Summer Prêt-à-Porter collection. 38.5 Guo Pei acknowledges the audience at the end of her fashion show during the 2018 Spring/Summer Haute Couture collection. 39.1 Ginza, Tokyo, 28 March 1969.

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1310 1313 1315 1319 1321 1324 1325 1327 1329 1331 1344 1345 1347 1350

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39.2 The Miyuki-zoku (Miyuki tribe) gathered around Miyuki street in Ginza, Tokyo, 28 August 1966. 39.3 Students protesting, 19 November 1971. 39.4 English model Twiggy visits Japan. 39.5 Go Go Hall in Tokyo, 18 September 1968. 40.1 Iranian women in chador protest during the Iranian Revolution, Tehran, Iran, 1978. 40.2 Women competing at a local hijab styles fashion show in Indonesia’s Aceh province, 21 January 2018. 40.3 Portrait of young Muslim woman in Ankara. 40.4 A Muslim woman demonstrates in Paris, 17 January 2004. 40.5 A model showcases designs on the runway by Dian Pelangi, Jakarta, Indonesia, 1 November 2014. 40.6 US artist Shepard Fairey’s flag hijab image, Berlin, 21 January 2017. 41.1 View of the interior of Le Bon Marché, engraving from L’Univers Illustré, 1872. 41.2 Jules David, ‘1066c: Etoffes et Nouveautés’, Le Moniteur des Dames et des Demoiselles, 1872. 41.3 Chromolithograph of the exterior of the Harrods department store, London, 1909. 41.4 Eugène Atget, Storefront, avenue des Gobelins, 1925, Gelatin silver print. 41.5 ‘La Mode Française’, 1888. 41.6 Handbill advertising a display of African tribesmen in traditional costumes at Cosmorama Rooms, Regent Street, London, 1850. 41.7 Anaïs Toudouze, ‘1687: Chapeaux de la maison’, Le Follet, 1852. 41.8 Le Musée Rétrospectif du Costume at the Paris Exposition Universelle, 1900. 41.9 An 1880 satin brocade wedding gown, as displayed in the Hall of American Costume in the Museum of History and Technology, c. 1964.

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42.1 A mourner grieves for her missing relative during the one hundredth-day anniversary of the collapse of the Rana Plaza building on 24 April 2013, Dakar, Bangladesh. 42.2 Fibre growers, spinners, weavers, and garment workers take part in Fashion Revolution’s #WhoMadeYourClothes? social media campaign. 42.3 Fibrevolution are growing flax in Oregon once again, after a period of fifty years. 42.4 The ‘Looop’ recycling system installed in H&M Stockholm, Sweden, 2020. 42.5 Industrial textile recycling in Panipat, India, 2009. 42.6 An upcycled jacket from Japanese label KUON. 42.7 Assemblage 002, Bacteria dyed reversible silk coat, 2019.

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MAPS FOR VOLUME II

29.1 Zhejiang province near Ningpo, and Shanghai and Northern Shandong province. page 1037 30.1 Europe in 1878 showing national borders after the Austro-Hungarian occupation of the Ottoman territory 1054 of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

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32.1 The retail price of merekani at Mombasa Bazaar in latter half of the 1920s. page 1149

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CONTRIBUTORS FOR VOLUME II

hissako anjo is Assistant Professor at the Department of Business, Hannan University, Osaka, Japan. djurdja bartlett was Reader in Histories and Cultures of Fashion at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, United Kingdom. regina lee blaszczyk is Professor of Business History and Leadership Chair in the History of Business and Society at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. christopher breward is Director of National Museums Scotland. stella bruzzi FBA is Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London, United Kingdom. liz bucar is Professor of Religion at Northeastern University, Boston, United States. nina l. cole is Lecturer and Postdoctoral scholar in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis, United States. antonia finnane is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. emi goto is Assistant Professor at Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan. karen tranberg hansen is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University, Evanston, United States.

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list of contributors

susan b. kaiser is Professor Emerita in the Departments of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, and Design at the University of California, Davis, United States. jonathan c. kaplan-wajselbaum is an Adjunct Fellow at the Imagining Fashion Futures Lab at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. ulrich lehmann is Associate Professor in Design Practice and Theory at The New School, New York, United States. lucy norris is Guest Professor of Design Anthropology and Material Culture at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, Germany. marco pecorari is Director of the MA in Fashion Studies, The New School Parsons Paris, France. julia petrov is Curator of Daily Life and Leisure, Royal Alberta Museum, Edmonton, Canada. ve´ ronique pouillard is Professor of International History at the University of Oslo, Norway. simona segre reinach is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, Italy and editor-in-chief of ZoneModa Journal. vivienne richmond is the co-editor of Textile History and was previously Senior Lecturer and Head of History at Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom. mina roces is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. toby slade is Associate Professor in the School of Design, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. miki sugiura is Professor of Global Economic History at Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan.

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list of contributors

claire wilcox is Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Professor in Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, United Kingdom. sophie woodward is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom.

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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

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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

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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.

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part iv Fashion, Modernism, and Modernity

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FASHIONABLE MASCULINITIES IN ENGLAND AND BEYOND Renunciation and Dandyism, 1800–1939 christopher breward The design, production, selling, and wearing of men’s clothing through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has had a significant impact on the visual culture and social experience of the modern world. It has also determined many of the underlying influences that have contributed to the development and expansion of fashion more generally, not just in terms of the shaping of men’s bodies, but also in relation to the dress of women and children.1 Yet its examination has been relatively neglected for most of the period we might associate with the rise of dress and fashion history as a serious focus of scholarship. It is only over the course of the past two decades that we have seen a flowering of journals, exhibitions, and monographs addressing the role played by the male wardrobe in the fashioning of social relations, taste, and the experience of modernity. My own doctoral work in the 1990s and related publications at the time drew on the ‘cultural turn’ and a re-focusing of the history of gender to consider the formation of masculinities in relation to patriarchy in a more nuanced way, revealing overlooked patterns of masculine consumption.2 1

2

Clare Rose, Making, Selling and Wearing Boys’ Clothes in Late Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2016). Farid Chenoune, A History of Men’s Fashion (Paris: Flammarion, 1993); John Harvey, Men in Black (London: Reaktion Books, 1995); Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 4/4 (2000); David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American

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Previous to this, the properties of masculine dress had remained the specialist preserve of economic and business historians (the history of modern industrialization is, after all, a history of the production and distribution of textiles destined, in large part, for military uniforms, workwear, and suits). Art and literary critics, and some designers and curators were likewise engaged in assessments of male dress (sartorial decoration held a special attraction for a generation of commentators in the 1960s and 1970s interested in the formal, aesthetic, and psychological aspects of male costume), but in general the study of men’s clothing and the motivations of male consumers were considered a minor aspect of the wider history of fashion.3 This chapter draws on the advance in scholarship of the past three decades to consider the arguments around the material, philosophical, and political qualities of men’s dress as a fundamental armature for the description and experience of fashion itself. It will trace its status as a vessel for local tradition, trade, and global connection in an age of competing empires; and it will investigate the adaptability of male clothing as an instrument of style and oppositional statement in relation to cultural identity. The functional and symbolic meanings of masculine fashionability are varied and complex. Its forms, particularly that of the English business suit, which over the course of the nineteenth century

3

Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Brent Shannon, The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain 1880–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007); Peter McNeil and Vicki Karaminas (eds.), The Men’s Fashion Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2009); Kate Irwin and Laurie Anne Brewer, Artist, Rebel, Dandy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 2013); Christopher Breward, The Suit: Form, Function & Style (London: Reaktion Books, 2016); Shaun Cole and Miles Lambert, Dandy Style: 250 Years of British Men’s Fashion (New Haven and London: Manchester Art Gallery and Yale University Press, 2021). Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York: Viking Press, 1960); Norah Waugh, The Cut of Men’s Clothes 1600–1900 (London: Faber and Faber, 1964); Hardy Amies, ABC of Men’s Fashion (London: Newnes, 1964); James Laver, Dandies (London: Routledge, 1968); David T. Jenkins and Kenneth G. Ponting, The British Wool Textile Industry, 1770–1914 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987).

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came to concretize a widely shared (and often contested) understanding of ‘normative’ masculine behaviour, have bequeathed a stubborn lexicon for modern sartorialism which leaves a legacy even in the early twenty-first century (Figure 21.1). For the century and a half covered here, the narratives within the fashionable male wardrobe of metropolitan Europe and North America, as it was understood in a vastly expanding field of fashion’s visual and material culture, illustrate a dynamic tension between seeming continuity and even ossification, and a surprising element of change and adaptation. The evolution of style was often captured in the detail of clothing rather than in radical shifts of form or silhouette, and can be reconstructed through representations including portrait and modern history

Figure 21.1 Eugène Atget, The Window of a Parisian Men’s Outfitters, photograph, 1926. From The Studio, vol. 98, London Offices of the Studio, London, 1929. Hulton Archive: Getty Images 2619192.

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painting and graphic art, commercial and amateur photography, fashion plates produced for the trade, literary description in diaries, biographies, travel writing, and novels, and its survival as items in museum collections. On the streets and in the clubrooms of London (the city most closely associated with setting trends in male fashion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), early nineteenth-century aristocratic dress was cut close to the body, heavily influenced by military uniform and sporting (particularly equestrian) dress, and already anticipating the rigorous simplification of dark woollen coat, waistcoat and trousers over white linen or cotton shirt that would signify the suit of business attire by the end of the century.4 The style of the 1810s and 1820s, however, prioritized calf-enhancing and full-length pantaloons (a bridge from the knee-length breeches of the late eighteenth century), swallow and tailcoats shaped to a slim waist, and elaborate neckties around high collars, all in a range of white, buff, blue, and black tones. By the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, the attenuated elegance of the Regency had given way to a more ebullient sense of Romanticism. The fashionable male figure in the first part of Queen Victoria’s reign celebrated a relative ‘loudness’ in pattern, texture, and colour which translated into a greater use of checks and plaids, velvets, furs, and brocades in the trimmings and accessories, and greens, browns, and maroons in the dyes. The latter half of the century, by contrast, saw a retrenchment through the 1860s and 1870s into concealment and constraint: high-buttoning collars at the neck, lowering and capacious waistlines on enveloping frock coats, fuller sleeves and straight stove-pipe trousers echoing cylindrical top hats, all in more subdued tones and dulled surfaces. From the 1880s to the first decade of the twentieth century and beyond into the 1920s and 1930s a sense of finesse and diversification and a return to more flattering fits made deliberate reference back to that earlier age of elegance. Morning coats and lounge suits, together with a proliferation of garments designed for travelling, sporting, and leisure pursuits, marked a commercialization of fashionable masculinity that saw many of these styles adapted for the 4

Christopher Breward, Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis (Oxford: Berg, 2004).

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mass market and for womenswear. As some fashion theorists have claimed, this broader democratization of a set of garments originally designed for aristocratic lifestyles unlocked the essence of modern fashion itself (Figure 21.2).5 This linear-style trajectory is of course reductive, judged by the terms of contemporary fashion historiography and method. But it is also instructive and deeply woven into the very warp of masculine fashionability as a particular phenomenon of late modernity. It is reductive because it aligns to that earlier moment of costume history when what was considered distinctive about fashion was the nature and manifestation of change itself, and because it chooses to focus on change as it was experienced at the centre of the colonial project, at the heart of the British Empire, rather than among its subjects or elsewhere. It is instructive because through such changes in shape and silhouette, broader structures of racial, sexual, and

Figure 21.2 James Tissot, The Circle of the Rue Royale, oil on canvas, 1868. Found in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images 2610290.

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Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (New York: Kodansha, 1994).

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social power have been widely inscribed, revealed, and understood, and because its lexicon established a language that both the menswear industry (particularly its distribution, advertising, and retail aspects), and critics and theorists of modern culture could profit from and adapt. Thus, more recent published research has moved on from the study of these dominant sartorial codes to consider, for example, the articulation of masculine style in the context of historical Black or queer cultures, or to re-focus away from London to consider the discourse of male fashion in New York, Shanghai, or Paris.6 Similarly, the territory of male sartorialism, taken up as a metaphor throughout its development by adjacent disciplines from political economy to art and architectural theory, continues to attract attention from writers and curators as an ideal vehicle for exploring wider social themes.7 We will explore some of these more complex, and global perspectives in the remainder of the chapter.

codes of renunciation and dandyism Men may be said to have suffered a great defeat in the sudden reduction of . . . sartorial decorativeness which took place at the end of the eighteenth century . . . Men gave up their right to all the brighter, gayer, more elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation, leaving these entirely to the use of women, and thereby making their own tailoring the most austere and ascetic of the arts . . . Man abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful. He henceforth aimed at being only useful.8

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Shaun Cole, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009); Valerie Steele, A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Fashion Institute of New York, 2013); John Potvin, Deco Dandy: Designing Masculinity in 1920s Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). Vestoj: The Journal of Sartorial Matters, 7 (2016). John Carl Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 110–11.

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In 1930 the London-based psychologist John Carl Flügel produced what has been perhaps one of the most influential of twentieth-century fashion ideas. In his concept of ‘the great masculine renunciation’ he described a subconscious rejection of ‘ostentatious’ dressing by late eighteenth-century men of taste in England. Brought about by the rise of industrialization, late capitalism, and a Protestant work ethic in an age of revolution, he suggested that this shift towards sartorial sobriety was a reflection of a more serious, and a more morally repressive society. This was perhaps an unsurprising conclusion for a pioneering Freudian and advocate of moves towards freedom of expression in the design and choice of male attire to reach. Flügel was a founder of the Men’s Dress Reform Party in 1930s Britain, which championed ‘unisex’ garments and a progressive sexual morality, and born to a generation of new thinkers who rejected many of the principles of ‘Victorianism’.9 More recently, the social historian David Kuchta has suggested an earlier simplification of the elite male wardrobe, less a reflection of the growing influence of the sober values of a rising mercantile class, than a consequence of the philosophical and religious debates around the divine right of kings and aristocratic duty that had begun in the 1630s. Flügel had suggested that ‘as commercial and industrial ideals conquered class after class, until they finally became accepted even by the aristocracies of all the more progressive countries, the plain and uniform costume associated with such ideals has, more and more, ousted the gorgeous and varied garments associated with the older order’.10 Kuchta makes counter-claims for the replacement of what he has termed ‘the old sartorial regime’ (or courtly discourse of ‘magnificence’ and conspicuous consumption) in England, with the deliberate redefinition of the construct of responsible governance, clothed, quite literally, in the gentleman’s suit by the restored Stuart monarchy: a smart uniform of modern political manners.11 Whether one takes Flügel’s later chronology and psychoanalytical emphasis as a guide or Kuchta’s rooting of change in the political 9

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Barbara Burman and Melissa Leventon, ‘The Men’s Dress Reform Party 1929–37’, Costume, 21/1 (1987), 75–87. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes, 113. Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit, 17–50.

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theory of an earlier historical moment, the concept of ‘renunciation’ is in many ways an attractive and compelling idea, essentially binding sartorial developments to the emerging political values of modern Western democracies. But as a universal argument for the genesis of a particular style of dressing, both interpretations fall a little short. They are perhaps too Anglo-centric and overarching. The simple reformative idea of uniformity in modern men’s dress, encapsulated by the introduction of the suit, also arose at various times across Europe and beyond, for example in Mughal India, the Dutch Republic, Gustavian Sweden, tsarist Russia, Directoire France, King Radama’s Madagascar, late imperial China, Edo Japan, and Atatürk’s Turkey.12 Reformed British aristocrats and newly emancipated gentleman capitalists may well have adapted the dark suit as an appropriate badge at particular moments of rapid societal and sartorial change. But prioritizing this at the expense of a more complex understanding of the opportunities and motivations driving men to acquire and wear fashionable clothes, or the many material possibilities residing in the design and reception of dress itself, is to narrow the range of possible interpretations. Despite these limitations, if English renunciatory dressing, in its denoting of revised but essentially entrenched social hierarchies, signified an essential adherence to a sense of political order in radically changed times, by the turn of the nineteenth century a new cult of Romanticism and individualism that raged across Europe set masculine fashion at the centre of an entirely new and revolutionary set of moral, artistic, and sartorial codes, which fashion and literary historians have embraced within the wideranging concept of ‘dandyism’.13 It was a liberating ‘whiggish’ phenomenon that stood rather in opposition to the conservative notion of renunciation and proved to be equally long-lasting and pervasive in terms of its cultural reach. The English novelist Bulwer Lytton captured the early spirit in his novel Pelham of 12

13

Sarah Fee, ‘The King’s New Clothing: Redressing the Body Politic in Madagascar 1815–1861’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 153–81. Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

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1828, where the eponymous hero sets down some instructions for modern self-presentation: Keep your mind free from all violent affections at the hour of the toilet. A philosophical severity is perfectly necessary for success . . . A man must be a profound calculator to be a consummate dresser . . . there is no diplomacy more subtle than dress . . . The most graceful principle of dress is neatness – the most vulgar is preciseness . . . Dress contains the two codes of morality – private and public. Attention is the duty we owe to others – cleanliness that which we owe to ourselves . . . Avoid many colours and seek by one prevalent and quiet tint to sober down the others. Apelles used only four colours, and always subdued those which were florid by a darkening varnish . . . Inventions in dressing should resemble Addison’s definition of fine writing, and consist of ‘refinements which are natural, without being obvious’.14

Fictional characters like Pelham abound in the novels, satires, and plays of the early nineteenth century. Elegant, elite, and exclusive, and most often represented dressed in exquisite black and white, they intensified the magnificent exuberance of the old-style courtier, refashioning it for a more democratic age: more a refinement perhaps, than a renunciation? Loosely based on the habits of just a few metropolitan men made famous through their collective tendency to promote their celebrity through the singular arrangement of their costumes and manners, these cyphers of modernity, styled ‘dandy’ in contemporary satirical and popular terminology, stood as a new and controversial code of fashionable behaviour.15 The idea of dandyism, though perhaps trivial in itself, revealed in its broader cultural agency the ways in which urbanism, capitalism, industrialization, colonialism, and Enlightenment theories of

14

15

Edward Bulwer Lytton, Pelham, Or the Adventures of a Gentleman (Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz Jr, 1842), 180–2. Dominic James, Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature 1750–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

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truth, were dissolving older sureties around the commonweal and ‘droit de seigneur’ in favour of the individualistic credo associated with the heroism of modern life (Figure 21.3).16 The idiomatic English socialite, George Bryan ‘Beau’ Brummell, stood out as a ‘semi-fictional’ exemplar of the dandy attitude (semifictional because although history records that he was born in London in 1778 and died in Caen, France, in 1840, the facts of his life are fairly obscure and survive as a palimpsest of myths and

Figure 21.3 Richard Dighton, A Portrait of George ‘Beau’ Brummell, colour lithograph, later coloration, 1805. Art Images / Getty Images 256514.

16

Elizabeth Amann, Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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anecdotes re-told in subsequent fashion biographies).17 The son of a minor equerry at Court, through wit, sheer force of personality, and the ability to make social connections, Brummell established himself as an expert in etiquette and a master of the art of dressing whose opinions influenced fashionable life from the top of London Society down. During the 1810s he cultivated a personal sartorial signature that drew on aristocratic tailoring styles evolved to suit sporting pursuits, court ceremonial, club-land business, and the whirl of salons and balls that constituted the London season. Brummell’s genius lay in reconfiguring these staples as a revolutionary costume for modern times, establishing a rule of taste based on subjective aesthetic criteria and the careful exercise of personal choice, rather than deference to status earned through family lineage or traditional forms of power exchange. The most striking thing about the new wardrobe was its relative subtlety: spotless white linen, expertly tailored dark blue swallow tailcoat, buff waistcoat and breeches and polished riding boots for the morning, and a more severe arrangement of black silk, fine wool, and velvet for evening wear. Fashion plates of the era, produced for the journals and shop displays of the burgeoning tailoring and menswear industries, record a fairly stable fashionable ensemble for men designed along these lines that, as we have seen, remained dominant templates well into the nineteenth century. Similarly, portraits produced for Britain’s landowners, politicians, colonial adventurers, and industrial entrepreneurs by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) and other leading painters during the final years of the Hanoverian reign fell back on the same pattern. Lawrence’s sumptuous painterly shorthand was particularly well suited to delineating the elongated black silhouettes of an elite generation of sitters, most often shown against a sweep of red velvet curtain. Some art critics praised a style of dressing and representation that was ‘simple, natural and unostentatious . . . an air of courteous suavity pervades the whole’.18 17

18

Hubert Cole, Beau Brummell (Newton Abbot: Readers Union, 1978); George Walden, Who Is a Dandy? (London: Gibson Square Books, 2002); Ian Kelly, Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2005). Peter Funnell, ‘Lawrence among Men Friends, Patrons and the Male Portrait’, in A. Cassandra Albinson, Peter Funnell, and Lucy Pelz (eds.),

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Figure 21.4 Thomas Lawrence, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, oil on canvas, 1804–9. 235 × 130.8 cm. Sepia Times / Universal Images Group via Getty Images 981_06_ql_c201210_23318.

For others, the artist’s talent was ‘thrown around the representations of the most ordinary things, and in his hands, the un-picturesque costume of modern times – the coats and waistcoats of modern man – lose their commonplace appearance’ (Figure 21.4).19 Critics of the 1820s were well ahead of their time in drawing attention to the quotidian, and intrinsically modern aspects of the

19

Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 23. Ibid.

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dandy’s monochrome suit. Four decades later, the Paris art world of the 1860s and 1870s was divided in its debates on the merits of contemporary dress as represented in the work of the Impressionists and their associates. Dress historian Aileen Ribeiro cites the writer Charles Blanc, whose reflections on modern fashion in Art in Ornament and Dress of 1875 seem to find echoes in the work of painters including Gustave Caillebotte, George Tissot, and Édouard Manet. Blanc ‘claimed that both architecture and dress . . . were governed by similar rules, such as symmetry, repetition (variety had charm but “repetition has more grandeur”) and economy of decoration. These features of modern life, however, often created a sense of alienation . . . The predominant darkness of outdoor clothing was linked to the greyness of buildings and streets, and created a tendency for people to . . . lose their individuality, and retreat into their own private worlds.’20 The great poet of Parisian modernity, Charles Baudelaire, had observed the attendant melancholy and ennui induced by such atmospherics in the revolutionary 1840s. His radical biographer, Walter Benjamin, notes: With the July Monarchy, blacks and greys began to predominate in men’s clothes. Baudelaire concerned himself with this innovation in his ‘Salon de 1845’. In the conclusion of his first work he wrote: ‘More than anyone else . . . the true painter, will be the man who extracts from present-day life its epic aspects and teaches us in lines and colours to understand how great and poetic we are in our patentleather shoes and neckties . . .’. One year later he wrote: ‘Regarding the attire, the covering of the modern hero, does it not have a beauty and charm of its own? . . . Is this not an attire that is needed by our epoch, suffering and dressed up to its thin black narrow shoulders in the symbol of constant mourning? The black suit and the frock coat not only have their political beauty as an expression of general equality, but also their poetic beauty as an expression of the public mentality . . . We all observe some sort of funeral. The unvarying livery of hopelessness is proof of the equality . . . And haven’t the folds in the material, which make grimaces and drape 20

Aileen Ribeiro, ‘Gustave Caillebotte: Paris Street; Rainy Day’, in Gloria Groom (ed.), Impressionism, Fashion & Modernity (Chicago and New Haven: Art Institute of Chicago, 2012), 186.

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christopher breward themselves around mortified flesh like snakes, their secret charm?’21

Certainly, the dark wool frock and lounge coats and glossy beaver skin top hats of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s that have survived the pawnbrokers, thrift merchants, and theatrical costumiers of the intervening years to enter museum collections, bear witness to Baudelaire’s splenetic lamentations. And yet, while their monochrome uniformity seems to speak to visions of sooty mill chimneys and funereal protocol, there is also something in their sharp seriality that suggests the beauty of an affecting and artificial minimalist aesthetic. Contemporaries recognized the harmonious role that a controlled and subdued palette might have as part of the broader social milieu, particularly when it came to considering menswear as a foil for the more colourful excesses of women’s dress. As one author of a guide for enjoying the night life of Paris noted in 1878: ‘We are the lining of the jewelry box against which the eternal diamond stands out . . . Civilized man, from the point of view of his clothing, is nothing more than the accompanist of woman, he allows her to sing the symphony of white, pink and green as a solo.’22 The inverse of such restraint was decadence. By the end of the century, the symbolism of heroic dandyism had taken on other, more sinister associations, as novelist J. K. Huysmans’ notorious anti-hero Des Esseintes set out to prove in the novel A Rebours of 1884: He won a considerable reputation as an eccentric – a reputation which he crowned by wearing suits of white velvet with goldlaced waistcoats, by sticking a bunch of Parma violets in his shirt front in lieu of a cravat, and by entertaining men of letters to dinners . . . One of these means . . . had been a funeral feast to mark the most ludicrous of personal misfortunes. The dining-room, draped in black, opened out onto a garden . . . the paths being strewn with charcoal, the ornamental pond edged with black basalt and filled with ink . . . The dinner itself was served on 21

22

Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1989), 76–7. Philippe Thiebaut, ‘An Ideal of Virile Urbanity’, in Groom (ed.), Impressionism, 136.

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fashionable masculinities in england and beyond a black cloth adorned with baskets of violets and scabious . . . The guests were waited on by naked negresses wearing only slippers and stockings in cloth of silver embroidered with tears. Dining off black bordered plates, the company had enjoyed . . . Russian rye bread, ripe olives from Turkey, caviar, mullet botargo, black puddings from Frankfurt, game served in sauces the colour of liquorice and bootpolish, truffle jellies, chocolate creams, plum puddings . . . and black-heart cherries . . . And after coffee and walnut cordial, they rounded off the evening with kvass, porter and stout.23

This decadence and its reception by journalists, moral commentators, and society at large had a profound effect on the discourse of masculine fashionability through almost the whole of the succeeding century. Dandyism, from the 1890s, came to be associated with sexual dissidence, corruption, and excess, and its outward manifestation through clothing and other forms of material culture, including interior design, was generally identified as the preserve of homosexual, artistic, and bohemian subcultures. In the spectacular and very singular figure of Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, whose 1895 imprisonment and public disgrace is widely quoted by cultural historians as precipitating the crisis over masculinity that informed confused twentieth-century attitudes to manliness and its association with fashion, the two models of dandy and gentleman are seen to have become dangerously conflated (Figure 21.5).24 During the time of his fame and then notoriety (from his return from the transatlantic promotion of ‘aesthetic’ dressing in the early 1880s to his trial), Wilde had adopted the refined wardrobe of the English upper-middle classes. To quote literary historian Regenia Gagnier, he ‘appear[ed] as a gentleman . . . In a manner which had been perfected by a dandy.’25 In this garb he seemed to mock the renunciatory ideals of Victorian gentlemanliness with ultimately disastrous results, for himself and, in the short term, for the open

23 24

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Joris Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), 27. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (London: Virago, 1992); Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side (London: Routledge, 1993); Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London: Cassell, 1994). Regenia A. Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1986), 67.

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Figure 21.5 W. & D. Downey, Oscar Wilde, photograph, 1889. W. & D. Downey / Hulton Archive / Getty Images 3274674.

representation of masculine fashionability as a creative or personal endeavour. Dandyism in the following decades found refuge in the more liminal, subcultural spaces of Bloomsbury, Harlem, Paris, Moscow, and other artists’ cities of the 1920s and 1930s.26 Where his attenuated figure graced the pages of mainstream fashion journals and advertising hoardings, as in the chic illustrations of Joseph 26

Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010); Wendy Hitchmough, The Bloomsbury Look (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020); Carol Tulloch, The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Potvin, Deco Dandy; Olga Vainshtein, ‘Russian Dandyism: Constructing a Man of Fashion’, in B. Evans Clements, R. Friedman, and D. Healey (eds.), Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (London: Routledge, 2002), 51–76.

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Figure 21.6 Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Advertisement for Arrow Collars & Shirts, c. 1925–30. Library of Congress: Corbin Historical: Getty Images IH168950.

Christian Leyendecker for Arrow Collars in the United States, or Ashley Havinden’s for British menswear giants Moss Bros and Austin Reed, it seemed somehow leached of controversy by the cool imperatives of commerce (Figure 21.6).27 27

Carole Turbin, ‘Fashioning the American Man: The Arrow Collar Man 1907– 1931’, in Barbara Burman and Carole Turbin (eds.), Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 100–21. Paul Jobling, ‘Virility in Design: Advertising Austin Reed and the “New Tailoring” during the Interwar Period in Britain’, Fashion Theory, 9/1 (2005), 57–84.

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dandyism and the foreign encounter Besides their role in defining gendered and sexual identity and the hierarchies of social class, the constructs of fashionable masculinities also contributed towards an understanding of national belonging and ethnic distinction in an age of empire and international connection. London’s fashionable menswear emporia were not only involved in selling the latest accoutrements to the habitués of Hyde Park and Piccadilly, but their services also provided wardrobes suited to colonial service in the dominions and English gentlemanly style designed in lighter weaves and colours for varied climates became a highly exportable commodity.28 Similarly influences from colonized nations also accented the wardrobe of men in the imperial metropolis. The romanticism of Indian dress sustained a lasting appeal to many early and mid-nineteenth-century Britons (Figure 21.7). In the mid-1840s the Edinburgh photographic pioneers Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson produced a calotype of a Mr Lane in Indian Dress (possibly the Arabic scholar and travel writer Edward William Lane), posing, as many middle-class and aristocratic men with colonial connections did, as a Maharaja in turban, jewellery, slippers, and heavily embroidered sash and gown, clasping looted ceremonial weaponry. Such appropriations were not confined to the performative spaces of the photographic studio, they also pervaded elements of everyday dressing from the 1830s to the 1860s. Silk waistcoats, such as the striking red and blue Spitalfields silk example (V&A: T.1-1954) held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, were often embellished with boteh (paisley), peacock feather and palm frond designs and traditional Kashmiri patterns. By the 1880s such details were more often confined to garments designed for private comfort as opposed to public display. Smoking caps and jackets, dressing gowns and pyjamas sat well among the colonial clutter of gentlemen’s clubs and studies; a counterfoil perhaps to the more formal imperial approach to racial demarcation that followed Queen Victoria’s naming as 28

Helen Callaway, ‘Dressing for Dinner in the Bush: Rituals of Self-Definition and British Imperial Authority’, in Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher (eds.), Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 232–47.

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Figure 21.7 Man’s waistcoat, Spitalfields silk, London, 1830s. Victoria and Albert Museum: Given by Mr H. Arnold Ovenden T.1-1954.

Empress of India in 1876 and a relief from the pressed khaki uniforms and topee helmets that signified power on the colonial parade ground (Figure 21.8).29 Closer to home, even the basic fabrics of the fashionable man’s wardrobe seemed to evoke memories of distant landscapes in their texture, tones, and even scent, embodying a sense of nationhood in their weave. Following Walter Scott’s popularization of Scotland’s romantic past through the Waverley novels of the 1810s and 1820s, and the royal family’s endorsement of the Highlands as a centre for hunting and holidays, tartans and tweeds enjoyed an enduring

29

Thomas S. Abler, Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress: European Empires and Exotic Uniforms (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Christopher Breward, Philip Crang, and Rosemary Crill (eds.), British Asian Style: Fashion & Textiles Past and Present (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2010).

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Figure 21.8 David Hill and Robert Adamson, Mr Lane in Indian Dress, calotype, c. 1845. 19.50 × 14.40 cm. Scottish National Portrait Gallery PGP HA 1273.

popularity as a staple of informal dressing.30 Such was the degree of its naturalization into the routines of homosocial middle-class life by 1900 that popular men’s fashion journal The Major could wax lyrical on its peculiar but distinctive properties in a manner that suggests it formed a virtual second skin for the hearty ‘true-born’ Briton (and, presumably, an antidote to dandyism’s emasculating tendencies) (Figure 21.9): There is a kind of rough and ready look about the pattern which you cannot help liking when you get used to it, and there is this advantage about the Harris tweed – each pattern is distinctive from the rest. You could always tell [it] by the peculiar peaty smell attached to it, but . . . 30

Fiona Anderson, Tweed (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 41–62, 81–102.

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Figure 21.9 The Duke of York with the Earl of Strathmore’s Shooting Party, Glamis Castle, Scotland, 1921. From London Illustrated News, Royal Wedding Number, 28 April 1923. Hulton Archive: Getty Images 2321799.

if you want a material that will last you, with fair wear, until you get absolutely tired of it, buy Harris tweed. I knew a man once who had a suit for eleven years, and then didn’t wear it out.31

But it was perhaps the form of the English suit itself which imparted the most profound and enduring influence on the modern wardrobe beyond the shores of Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a period in which several nations across the world adapted the suit in the context of local cultures. In China, for example, reformist calls for the modernization of society along Western lines were accelerated by its defeat in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894 and changes were swiftly imposed in line with the militarization of the population and updating of public institutions. The consequences in terms of material and sartorial culture were profound and inspired by Japanese precedent, 31

Cited in Breward, Hidden Consumer, 51.

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a popular emphasis on improving physical and moral strength saw a renewed focus on clothing, particularly the military uniform, as the vanguard for vestimentary and societal change.32 Besides a trend towards the adoption of uniforms, it is also significant that much discussion on the implication of reform in the popular media focused on the increasing visibility of the European three-piece suit on the streets of China’s cities, particularly its most cosmopolitan city Shanghai, where the proximity of British and American fashionable styles was ever present. Indeed, the fashioning of men’s bodies became a topic of intense debate at the forefront of political transformation in military and civil contexts simultaneously. As several scholars have noted, a familiarity with, and interest in foreign clothing was well established in China, but its deliberate mobilization as a tool for wider change was something new and radical, evoking strong feelings, replaying those debates around renunciatory manliness and dandyism that had provoked reflection in mid-nineteenth-century European cities.33 Chinese elites had enjoyed dressing up in what they termed ‘barbarian’ European styles since the Tang dynasty. In some ways this resembled the way that nineteenth-century Englishmen like Edward William Lane (1801–1876) proudly displayed trophy items from India and the Arab world on their bodies as signifiers of travel or orientalist scholarship, or the manner in which their diplomat predecessors in the early days of the East India Company often adopted local dress traditions as a matter of politesse and comfort. Following the increasing incursion of missionaries and traders into China through the seventeenth century, the identification of synergies and differences between styles and systems of dress led to a sophisticated understanding of sartorial semiotics. However, the psychological impacts of European imperialism and the economic 32

33

Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 71. Robert E. Harris, ‘Clothes Make the Man: Dress, Modernity and Masculinity in China 1912–1937’, in Wu Hing and K. R. Tsiang (eds.), Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Verity Wilson, ‘Western Modes and Asian Clothing’, in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).

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effects of colonialism sharpened distinctions and encouraged a division in the way respective codes of fashionability were interpreted. In the eyes of Chinese reformers, the overtly ‘modern’ suits of the British, French, German, American, and Japanese adventurers and businessmen drawn to the concessions of Shanghai in the early twentieth century offered a contrasting model of progress to the elegant historicism of caizi (scholarly) historicist taste (which held sway in elite intellectual circles, as something akin to the decadent aestheticism of European dandyism), one whose ‘virile’ wu (martial) associations were worthy of emulation. In 1908, the reformer Kang Youwei was emphatic in his endorsement of the suit: Today in the intercourse of the ten thousand nations, all are inclining toward a greater unity. It is only our nation whose dress is different, and they do not feel close to us, and friendly relations with them have not been secured . . . Today’s is a mechanized world. With many machines there is strength . . . But to be bound by the thousands of years of the . . . long-sleeved and broad-sashed Confucian scholar’s robe, and with a long robe and elegant gait to enter the world of competition with the ten thousand nations, this would be like wearing tinkling jade pendants to put out a fire, and truly is not appropriate.34

The arising debates about dressing for modern life were passionate and often self-contradictory. Chinese commentators recognized something novel and exciting in the bifurcated, tailored suit, but also cleaved to historical and spiritual precedent in favouring traditional robes, more suited to established Chinese attitudes to the body – all the while acknowledging that such styles appeared to emphasize all the problems endemic in the society they wished to change.35 The difference was an essentialist one, summed up by the novelist Lin Yutang (1895–1976) who stated that ‘the philosophy behind Chinese and Western dress is that the latter tries to reveal the human form, while the former tries to conceal it. But as 34 35

Harris, ‘Clothes Make the Man’, 180. Hissako Anjo and Antonia Finnane, ‘Tailoring in China and Japan: Cultural Transfer and Cutting Techniques in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Lemire and Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies, 263–88.

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the human body is essentially like the monkey’s . . . the less of it revealed the better!’36 This uncomfortable meeting of cloth, body, and cultures produced material anomalies and representational anxieties in Shanghai’s streets and on the pages of its press. The physical effect and unaccustomed freedom of wearing tailored trousers like those of the ‘straight long leg’ foreigners appeared to change the posture of those Chinese men who dared adopt them in the first wave, propelling them with literal speed into the new century. But the risk was a worthy one. Indeed, Mao Zedong himself lay the blame for national inertia and inequality on the scholar’s robe in an essay promoting physical culture in 1917. He argued that the habitual and misplaced honour bestowed on scholarly attributes and attire had led to a situation whereby for Chinese intellectual elites ‘to stick out their arms and expose their feet, to extend their limbs and bend their bodies’ would be shameful, and yet in Mao’s opinion a necessary sacrifice.37 Regardless of the political arguments, the kinetic confusions of dressing across boundaries were disorientating and Shanghai’s status as an international entrepôt magnified them. This fluidity of meaning attached to the new fashions and items of clothing meant that familiar signifiers of race, social caste, age, and gender were becoming unacceptably blurred for some and productively provocative for others. In 1912 the Shen Bao newspaper lamented, ‘Chinese people are wearing foreign clothes, foreigners are wearing Chinese clothes, men are wearing female adornments, prostitutes are imitating schoolgirls, schoolgirls are imitating prostitutes, common people are dressing like officials, officials are dressing like commoners.’38 Yet by the 1920s and 1930s, glamorous images of the suit (alongside tango dresses and shingled hair for women) prevailed in Shanghai’s thriving film and advertising industry and its figurefitting lines increasingly graced the lithe bodies of Chinese movie stars, singers, and athletes in the pages of glamour magazines.39 Such was the demand for clothes capturing the modern spirit that Shanghai soon became associated with a particular expertise in 36 39

Harris, ‘Clothes Make the Man’, 175. 37 Ibid., 181. 38 Ibid., 188. Christopher Breward and Juliette MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

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modern tailoring techniques, so much so that it might be argued that it was commercial imperatives, alongside political pressure, that saw the English-style suit first cautiously adopted and then profitably adapted in the region. In common with many other Chinese towns and indeed with cities in the rest of the world, tailoring formed an important occupation and contributor to the local economy, supplying a basic need to the market and straddling traditional forms of hand-wrought production that had remained unchanged for centuries, alongside newer practices enabled by the technology of the sewing machine, the retail innovations of the department store, and the wider promotion of modern advertising techniques. The same was true for tailors in nineteenth-century London, New York, Vienna, and Paris, and like them, Shanghai also benefited from a large, cosmopolitan population supplying skilled artisans and eager and enlightened customers (Figure 21.10). In a manner not dissimilar to Savile Row, Shanghai traded on pioneer myths of founding entrepreneurs and the existence of

Figure 21.10

A Scene from a Shanghai Dance Club, photograph, 1926. Bettmann and Getty Images U345012INP.

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long-standing tailoring traditions and districts which went on to fuel the success of dynastic enterprises and the expansion of profitable industrial sectors through the first half of the twentieth century. The father of tailoring here was Zhao Chunlan who had established the ‘first’ Western-style tailor’s shop in the 1850s, following a visit to the United States. By 1920 thousands of tailors served a population of three million Shanghainese and supported sophisticated retail empires in the city’s best shopping streets: Hongxiang Fashion Store and Rongchangxiang Tailors in the Nanjing Road and the Yungshang Fashion Company near Jing’an Temple Road.40 Out of these beginnings Shanghai also became associated with a distinctive regional tailoring style alternatively named the Ningbo or Red Gang (Hongbang) style in homage either to the nearby port city of Ningbo which supplied much of the skilled labour for Shanghai’s luxury menswear trade, or to the red hair and pink complexions of Caucasian clients. Ningbo tailors had also established networks in Dongbei in the north of China which some claimed brought a Russian influence into their work, but it is more likely that their reputation for finely detailed finishing had been honed in the overseas branches of British menswear companies trading in the concessions to expatriates. Whatever the origins of their approach, Ningbo tailors became famous for a process combining the skills of the engineer and the sculptor, based on more than forty body measurements and the precise steaming of seams, in which wearer and cloth seemed to become one.41 The 1930s were the style’s golden age, bolstered through the foundation of the Shanghai Cutting and Tailoring College and the city’s international reputation for glamour, but the political and economic turmoil of the 1940s and 1950s led to the migration of most Ningbo tailors to Hong Kong (where they thrived in Britain’s off-shore post-war clothing industries), a rejection of European sartorial values in mainland China, and the wilful destruction of Shanghai’s textile and garment manufacturing base by the Communist regime.

40 41

Finnane, Changing Clothes, 111. Christopher Breward, ‘The Shanghai Dandy’, in Breward and MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai, 252–3.

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conclusion In a century and a half then, since the advent of modern tailoring techniques and the establishment of nineteenth-century imperial networks, writers, artists, tailors, and consumers have grappled with the registers of masculine style across distant but connected cities and regions. It is perhaps no surprise that those twin tenets of English sartorialism, renunciation and dandyism, have found fertile ground for adaptation. The rhetorical ‘knowingness’ of the language of masculine fashionability, part satire, part serious political commentary, has found itself ideally suited to dressing bodies in flux while critiquing the circumstances in which fashion (and the power structures of gender, race, and social class) is produced and consumed. Karen Transberg Hansen in her chapter ‘Colonial Fashion Histories’ in this volume provides a striking example in her opening description of a ballroom dance championship in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1940, where local male participants strike a defiant note in their adoption of sunglasses, green pork-pie hats, and white cotton trousers in combination with tailcoats and white silk scarves: an echo of the assertive and refined elegance of the jazz scene in 1920s Chicago, zoot-suit subversion in 1940s California, or twentyfirst-century Sapeur elegance in post-colonial Brazzaville and Kinshasa (Figure 21.11). Max Beerbohm, one of the great English writers on dandyism, who authored the definitive essay ‘Dandies and Dandies’ in the 1890s, showed how ‘Dandies make themselves. Whatever they may be by birth and nurture, dandies are born anew as dandies when they dress themselves according to the dandy code. The dandy self, naked and fresh, is a figure in black and white. Completely dressed, almost completely monochrome, he is, to put it simply, a written thing.’42 While the very different postwar status quo and re-focusing of the menswear industry towards the mass youth market after 1945 may have made nineteenth-century debates on dandyism seem nostalgic or even irrelevant, its underlying effects continue to cast shadows 42

Robert Viscusi, Max Beerbohm, or the Dandy Dante Re-reading with Mirrors (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 28.

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Figure 21.11 Jelly Roll Morton, Chicago, c. 1923. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images 74284677.

and inscribe meaning.43 Historians of the future may even find its grammar a useful way in to explaining contemporary debates on non-binary identification, ‘toxic masculinity’, or the struggle for racial equality – so far as they relate to the clothes we wear and our performance of self.

select bibliography Amann, Elizabeth, Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

43

Christopher Breward, ‘The Dandy Laid Bare: Embodying Practices and Fashion for Men’, in Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis (London: Routledge, 2000), 221–38.

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fashionable masculinities in england and beyond Breward, Christopher, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Breward, Christopher, The Suit: Form, Function & Style (London: Reaktion Books, 2016). Chenoune, Farid, A History of Men’s Fashion (Paris: Flammarion, 1993). Cole, Sean and Miles Lambert, Dandy Style: 250 Years of British Men’s Fashion (New Haven and London: Manchester Art Gallery and Yale University Press, 2021). Harvey, John, Men in Black (London: Reaktion Books, 1995). Irwin, Kate and Laurie Anne Brewer, Artist, Rebel, Dandy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 2013). Kuchta, David, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). McNeil, Peter and Vicki Karaminas (eds.), The Men’s Fashion Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2009). Miller, Monica L., Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Dandyism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009). Moers, Ellen, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York: Viking, 1960). Potvin, John, Deco Dandy: Designing Masculinity in 1920s Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). Shannon, Brent, The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006). Ugolini, Laura, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain 1880–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007). Zakim, Michael, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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FASHION IN CAPITALISM Another Modernity, 1800 to the Present ulrich lehmann

introduction Whereas textiles, cloth, garments, and dress are seen as anthropological, supra-historical terms for concrete material covers of the human body, the more abstract term ‘fashion’ is defined in economic terms through its central place within the capitalist mode of production. This definition emerges from a historically and geographically particular nexus within Western industrialization and expands to fashion’s constituent role in capitalist socio-economic systems wherein social relations are based on commodities for exchange, private ownership of the means of production, and the exploitation of wage labour. Enshrined in bourgeois ideologies, capitalism has been flaunted, at least since the eighteenth century in the globalized North, as the dominant socio-economic form of production, established within a monetary system, and exported through colonialism and imperialism across the world.1 Situating fashion within capitalism allows for two distinct yet connected interpretations. The first considers the meaning of the word fashion – in generic terms emerging from the Romanic mode, 1

In this definition there is a distinct echo of Immanuel Wallerstein’s analysis of ‘world-systems’ that sought to provide an alternative to positivist modernization and globalization theories in capitalism, for instance in his tenet of a world system as a set of mechanisms that redistributes surplus value from the raw materials-producing and cheap labour periphery to the industrialized core. See Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization (London: Verso, 1996) and World-System Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

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denoting ‘manner of’ or ‘ways of’2 – as the constant renewal of commodities, initially within set time periods and social performances (seasonal dress, leisure activities, display in gendered bourgeois rituals, etc.), that now has accelerated in tempo and diffused in direction, to determine a general mode of globalized consumption across post-industrial as well as industrializing societies. A pattern of renewed consumption within greatly reduced timespans determines the exploitative and wasteful production of commodities that rightly brands the fashion industry, particularly in its production of garments and accessories.3 The second interpretation concerns the concrete production of fashion through textiles, garments, accessories, and make-up/hair, where the social conditions of labour determine the abstraction, reification, and alienation that the body experiences in capitalism. This move from the concrete to the abstract is materially very present in fashion production where a piece of clothing develops from functional cover with use value to a surplus value-generating commodity, whose social and cultural evaluation occurs independent of the exchange value of its material and labour. ‘The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value’,4 wrote Karl Marx in the first chapter of Capital that famously explains the value of the commodity through the fashion-equation of twenty yards of linen with one coat. In clothing, especially, the commodity envelops the body of the subject and imprints it with the labour that is required to produce it.5 This leads to the subject’s body carrying, literally, alienating labour in capitalism as its outer, social 2

3

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5

For an etymology of ‘fashion’, see Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 18–28. See for example recent popular polemics on fashion’s impact on socioeconomic and natural environments, by Lucy Siegle, To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing out the World? (London: Fourth Estate, 2011); and Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion (London: Pluto Press, 2014). Karl Marx, Capital [1867/1873], Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), xxxv, 71. Arguably, the labour to maintain clothing, repair, repurpose, and recycle/ refashion clothes or accessories becomes part of the economic process. Such labour occupies an ambiguous position vis-à-vis the present dominance of globalized fast fashion: it can be seen as an oppositional gesture to find sustainable and cost-saving solutions by reinforcing, over-stitching, or patching up textiles and garments (cf. Japanese sashiko) but, in consequence, is

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form that is visible to all. Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism opens thus: A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.6

In fashion, the clothes that are worn cease to exist as things that have an essential use value, for instance protecting from rain or insulating us against cold, and come to reproduce social relations between commodities. Very few people around the globe today wear continuously one type of garment whose pattern has been optimized to allow for habitual physical movement and is cut from a material that responds to the climate they find themselves in. Most consumers wear clothing or accessories that stand in a particular relation to other fashion commodities – for example, being perceived as different from clothing styles that are prevalent in their immediate environment or allowing them to play with preexisting class affiliation or gender roles. It is important to understand fashion in capitalism not simply as indicative of the social relation between subjects but of the social relation between products of labour and forms of value. The next pages trace fashion as it has been interpreted within analyses of capitalism. Yet not by recapitulating its positivist role in the progress of capitalist economies, as constant renewal of commodity consumption and thereby objectifying the performance of class, race, and gender, but, dialectically: fashion as examples in exposing capitalism’s ills. By tracing ways in which fashion has been used in the fundamental and universal critique of capitalism, most notably through the Marxist approach to political economy and its theoretical developments, it emerges as simultaneously constituting and contradicting capitalism.

6

often relegated in the fashion media to an individual, craft-based terrain that is deemed to have only tenuous connections with fashion’s economic cycles. Marx, Capital, 82–3.

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And although the following historiography of fashion within capitalism proceeds more or less chronologically, it is not to be read as linear, teleological history towards a ‘goal’ (i.e. the ‘democratization’ of global luxury through increased availability or technological progress). It rather shows patterns across time and space that repeat themselves – much like fashionable styles return in clothing and accessories – in the form of contradictions within social relations or conflicts of gender and race, and through key terms like ‘value’ and ‘reproduction’. The historiographies demonstrate fashion’s dialectical function within capitalism: it can be seen as its thesis in exemplifying the production–consumption relation that explains the creation of value in capitalist economies; equally, it can be seen as its antithesis by revealing how the subject is materialized in objects (clothing, accessories, hairstyles, makeup, diet, and the representation of gestures and postures), which provokes social consciousness and political action that oppose capitalist alienation of the people. Marxist political economy is a method which asks that observation and theoretical analysis are put into practice. Historical materialism as a principal part of this political-economic thought progressively understands phenomena as concretely material as much as actively social. It thereby focuses on production as determining consumption (and vice versa) and analyses the making of fashion, before it engages with its reproduction (as our postindustrial age supremely does7) in order to obscure from consumers the reality of producing goods behind a mirage of simulated images and fictional narratives. In this context, the study of fashion theory and history had shown itself in the past complicit in perpetuating myths of fashion’s origin and dissemination (cf. the once dominant hypothesis of the trickle-down effect or of the stylistic centrality of haute couture), without much questioning of the economic reality behind the making of clothes and the impact that, for instance, seasonal cycles, the move from the functional to the commodified, or the objectification of the subject, have on structures in social and cultural life. Such myths have been critiqued substantially for 7

The term post-industrial denotes here economic growth within industrialized countries when manufacturing is less of a ‘driver’ compared to information technology and the service sector.

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contemporary fashion in recent years, yet persist in analyses of its history. Fashion appears in the capitalist production process as embodied materialism: it creates an outer shell, a second skin for the body that becomes marked by socio-cultural structures, in particular within the system of corporeal commodification (into class, sex, gender, race, etc.) that is prevalent in capitalism. The concrete construction of a surface around the subject through materials and technologies is fused with its changing relationship to the object, and this generates fashion’s singular position. Fashion is both material cover and materialist representation of the subject beneath it, which defines itself through the consumption of particular apparels. To explain this double effect, political economy is the best fit, I believe, for fashion’s analysis as abstract concept and concrete industry.

origins: a critique of luxury I would like to begin with Marx as the original thinker to bring together economic and philosophical thought, to arrive at an expansive analysis of capitalism and its impact on the social, material/physical, and ontological (self-)perception of modern woman and man. Fashion occurs in Marx’s writing from the very start, as combination of material and philosophical consideration, rendering the topic a highly potent indicator for life in capitalism. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx’s earliest thoughts on the intersection of Hegelian heritage and economic research, he critiques the ‘Say–Ricardo school’ in the context of the luxury debate that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had revealed exemplary positions within bourgeois political economy.8

8

For a concise study of the historical place of Say’s economic analysis of luxury, see Philippe Steiner, ‘Jean-Baptiste Say: The Entrepreneur, the Free Trade Doctrine and the Theory of Income Distribution’, in Gilbert Faccarello (ed.), Studies in the History of French Political Economy: From Bodin to Walras (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 196–228.

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The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts were drafted in Paris, where Marx had immigrated between 1843 and 1844. The place is significant for a number of reasons. First, Marx began his sustained analysis of classical economic thought while experiencing directly the struggles of an organized French working class and its consciousness, being forced therefore to reconcile his rather elitist studies of materialist philosophy with contemporary revolutionary practice – the combined demand for which would set up his Communist Manifesto. Second, the city of Paris in the early stirrings of yet another revolution provided him with the spatial and structural notion of recurring historical patterns – a key element of historical materialism – in particular with the unfulfilled ideal of the first French Revolution that had to be repeated and recast across Marx’s life (in Paris, for instance, in 1830, 1848, and 1871), to advocate Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s famous historical ‘leap’ from quantitative development to qualitative change.9 Repetition would become a key parameter for the (historical) materialist reading of fashion, when old styles are resurrected in the guise of the new. Third, in the spring of 1844 Marx first met Friedrich Engels, who had been working across the previous couple of years on behalf of his family’s textile company in Manchester, where he was confronted with the social conditions of labour, in particular the astute deprivation and alienation brought on by mechanized textile production. Engel’s first-hand, practical knowledge of fashion production, for instance the dependence of textile weaving on forecasting seasonal trends and the accumulation of value across steps within the making of mass-produced garments, would prove instrumental for the examples that inform Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital. Fourth, Marx’s focus of his critique on the luxury analyses by liberal economists during the first phase of French industrialization like Jean-Baptiste Say,10 Antoine Destutt 9

10

See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, 2 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1929), vol. i [1812–13], 219–20, 367–9, and 388; and, for its discussion within fashion, Lehmann, Tigersprung, 241–7 and Ulrich Lehmann, Fashion and Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 52–5. Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) was a French laissez-faire economist and businessman who promoted free trade, free-market structures, and entrepreneurship.

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de Tracy,11 and David Ricardo12 led directly into the investigation of the relationship between production and consumption that is critical for his subsequent analysis of the role of value in capitalism. Finally, Paris had been established for a long time as the main site of producing ‘fashion’ in Europe, in the sense of innovating stylistic trends as much as in the actual making of textiles and garments, therefore an ever-present reminder for Marx of the double materialism that fashion furthers within the production– consumption relation: the materiality of weaving, spinning, dressmaking, tailoring, etc., and generating a society of commodity fetishes. In the Manuscripts Marx ascribed to Say and Ricardo a tendency that ‘recommends thrift and execrates luxury’. But: The Say–Ricardo school is hypocritical in not admitting that it is precisely whim and caprice which determine production. It forgets the ‘refined needs’, it forgets that there would be no production without consumption; it forgets that as a result of competition production can only become more extensive and luxurious. It forgets that, according to its views, a thing’s value is determined by use, and that use is determined by fashion. It wishes to see only ‘useful things’ produced, but it forgets that production of too many useful things produces too large a useless population. Both sides forget that extravagance and thrift, luxury and privation, wealth and poverty are equal.13

The context for the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts renders fundamental its placement of fashion: the dictum that ‘there would be no production without consumption’ is followed by denoting a progressive tendency, ‘production can only become more extensive and luxurious’, that culminates in ‘a thing’s 11

12

13

Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) was a liberal French aristocrat and social theorist who analysed economies in terms of action and exchange. David Ricardo (1772–1823) was an English banker, parliamentarian, and classical economist who developed a one-dimensional labour theory of value. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ‘Third Manuscript: Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), iii, 310.

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value’ as being ‘determined by use, and that use is determined by fashion’. The value resides not in the material function of a thing but in its place as commodity in the production–consumption relationship. It seems simplistic to ascribe fashion’s ceaseless promotion of production to the fact that it is encouraging people to acquire commodities anew each season, yet in capitalism ‘use’ is as abstracted and distant from the subject as ‘exchange’. It constitutes the objectified relation between commodities that stands in for the relation between subject and object. Correspondingly, production in capitalism must follow an internal logic of material ‘thing’relations that replace social relations. Fashion indeed determines ‘use’, when ‘use’ is constantly intensified consumption, but it also generates production of new objectified relations in industry and society alike. Commodity fetishism ‘assumes’ in the eyes of subjects ‘the fantastic form of a relation between objects’,14 and in capitalism this fantasy is fuelled by fashion in determining the interaction of outer social forms. The relationship between production and consumption in fashion becomes central to defining value. In his Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (c. 1858), Marx used the example of an itinerant tailor, who visits a client in his home, to initiate an analysis of the relation between ‘objectified labour’ and ‘living labour’ within an initial system of ‘simple circulation’. Both [the client and the artisan] in fact exchange only use values with one another; one exchanges necessaries, the other labour, a service which the other wants to consume, either directly – personal service – or he furnishes him the material etc. from which, with his labour, with the objectification of his labour, he makes a use value, a use value designed for A’s consumption. For example, when the peasant takes a wandering tailor, the kind that existed in times past, into his house, and gives him the material to make clothes with . . . The man who takes the cloth I supplied to him and makes me an article of clothing out of it gives me a use value. But instead of giving it directly in objective form, he gives it in the form of activity.15

14 15

Marx, Capital, 83 (translation modified). Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) [1857–8] (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 465.

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At first, there appears a rather straightforward materialist presentation of labour and consumption: the materiality of the clothing is infused with labour, not only as an economic fact but also as a social instance of activity. In the scenario of the wandering tailor and his working-class client, the cloth or garment is not only an objectification of labour arising from material production but one that is born from consumption. Value is expressed first as use value, but it is not perceived by the consumer as equivalent value to labour. In clothing for fashion, the use value is subordinate to another form of value, namely surplus value. The ‘process of utilizing or exploiting [Verwertungsprozess]’ becomes one of ‘appropriation’, especially within the cadre of contemporary consumption.16 The modern, industrialized making of clothing becomes a primary example of objectifying living labour through means and processes of production. Although Marx did not furnish this de facto cultural denotation of economic transformation, objectification provides the foundation for fashion as such, since fashion unites a particular group of commodities that objectifies simultaneously the labour within them and their consumers. Marx alerted his reader to the fundamental dialectic of production: ‘the person objectifies himself in production, the thing subjectifies itself in the person’.17 This dialectic is expressed in fashion through the material value, which finds its antithesis in the surplus value. The material value of the object resides in the price of the fabric, the wages for the labourer to make the garment, the cost of the facilities for production, etc., which is negated by the surplus value of the finished fashion commodity that is consumed by the wearer within a social context. The surplus value abstracts the material value, and without this abstraction the production of the material object could not exist, since its economic viability can only be guaranteed by the volatile, seasonal, and social consumption of trends.18 ‘When cotton becomes yarn’, wrote Marx, 16 18

Ibid., 469. 17 Ibid., 89. In chapter 16 of Capital, Marx distinguishes further between absolute and relative surplus value; whereby the former is constituted by ‘[t]he prolongation of the working-day beyond the point at which the labourer would have produced just an equivalent for the value of his labour-power, and the appropriation of that surplus-labour by capital, this is production of absolute surplus-value’; whereas the latter is originally defined as follows: ‘the

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fashion in capitalism yarn becomes fabric, fabric becomes printed etc. or dyed etc. fabric, and this becomes, say, a garment, then . . . in each of these subsequent processes, the material has obtained a more useful form, a form more appropriate for consumption; until it has obtained at the end the form in which it can directly become an object of consumption, when, therefore, the consumption of the material and the suspension of its form satisfies a human need, and the transformation is the same as its use. The substance of cotton preserves itself in all of these processes; it becomes extinct in one form of use value in order to make way for a higher one, until the object exists as an object of direct consumption.19

Here, the significance of materialism as being attuned simultaneously to concrete production and to the abstract, social conditions of labour and the resulting value of objects is very apparent indeed. The actual fibres of the cloth remain fundamental to the process of making the garment, yet they are abstracted into a value that is expressed only in consumption. ‘Labour’, says Marx, ‘is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time.’20 The temporality and transitoriness in fashion, based on the transformation of the labour process and on the activity of the worker, can be observed in the mode of living, the changing style of objects, as well as the new words that writers who were contemporary to Marx’s political economy, like Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, or Charles Baudelaire would coin to describe clothes on display in the streets and salons of the French capital.21

19 21

production of relative surplus-value, revolutionises out and out the technical processes of labour, and the composition of society’. For fashion this is historically evidenced, too, in the move from handicraft (cf. itinerant tailor) to mechanized and standardized production of garments that reflects in its changed methods the changed forms for the (social) consumption of fashion. See Marx, Capital, 509ff. Marx, Grundrisse, 360. 20 Ibid., 360–1. See for example the dresses of ‘La Duchesse de Langeais’, written by Balzac in 1833 as part of his Histoire de Treize, in La Comédie humaine, vol. v (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); Théophile Gautier’s essay De la mode (Paris: PouletMalassi & de Broise, 1858); and Baudelaire’s feuilletons of 1863, collected as The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1995).

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production and consumption Clothes and accessories would be observed by male authors principally on women’s bodies. The oppression of women within the nexus of capitalism and fashion appears in multi-form: within an exploitative industry of female labour as much as through the commodification of women’s bodies for social relations. Since the 1600s in parts of Europe and Asia and, progressively, after 1800, workingclass as well as peasant women made up the majority of the global industrial labour force for textile production and for mass-produced clothing as well.22 During the same period, commodity fetishism resulting from industrial capitalism reifies, objectifies, and alienates women’s bodies through clothing and accessories. Alexandra Kollontai, in the sixth of her lectures on The Woman’s Place in Social Development, which she gave to working-class women at Sverdlov University in 1921, spoke about the impact of industrialization on women’s labour.23 In line with the historical materialist approach to history she defined ‘the social position of women through her role in production. As long as the majority of women were tied in rather unproductive domestic labour, all women’s attempts and initiatives for equality and independence had to fail.’24 Advances in the mass production of textiles since at least the end of the eighteenth century led to the growth of a female 22

23

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See Claudia Jones, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman (New York: National Women’s Commission, Communist Party of the USA, 1949), 6; Mariarosa Dalla Costa, ‘Reproduction and Emigration’ [1974], in Camille Barbagallo (ed.), Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019), 93; Angela Davis, ‘The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective’, in Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 227; and Silvia Federici, ‘Marx and Feminism’, ‘Über Marx hinaus: Feminismus, Marxismus und die Frage der Reproduktion’, LuXemburg, 2/3 (2017), 4. Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) was a socialist feminist politician and theoretician, who was elected to the Central Committee in 1917 and became Commissar for Social Welfare in the Soviet government. Alexandra Kollontai, Die Situation der Frau in der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung (Vierzehn Vorlesungen vor Arbeiterinnen und Bäuerinnen an der Swerdlow-Universität, April bis Juni 1921; 6. Vorlesung: ‘Die Frauenarbeit in der Entwicklungsperiode der kapitalistischen Großindustrie’), www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kollontai/1921/frau/in dex.html (accessed 5 January 2021).

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industrial workforce and allowed women to emancipate themselves through work. It occurred in many working-class families that the wife went out to work while her husband stayed at home, cared for the children, and did the housework. At times, this was rather typical in areas of textile production in the USA. In certain towns manufacturers preferred to hire principally cheap labour and thus women were working in e.g. a weaving factory while her husband remained at home. Temporarily, these small towns were designated as ‘shetowns’. The general recognition of women’s labour forced the entire working class to check its hitherto existing position vis-àvis women and accept them finally as comrades and equals in their proletarian fight.25

The emancipation of working-class women through production, that is, as acting subjects – albeit often exploited and alienated by the factory owner – rather than being aligned with the cliché of the bourgeoise as visible yet passive consumers of fashions, was logical for Kollontai, since her feminism was tied intimately to the reformation of labour in the burgeoning Soviet Republic. Six decades later the Marxist-feminist Angela Davis echoed Kollontai’s findings about early industrialization in her essay ‘The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective’; yet she was compelled to add a pessimistic coda, reflective of the continuous pattern of women’s economic discrimination. The postrevolutionary surge of industrialization resulted in a proliferation of factories in the northeastern section of the new 25

Kollontai, ‘Die Frauenarbeit in der Entwicklungsperiode der kapitalistischen Großindustrie’. An earlier socialist-feminist analysis can be found in Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, The Woman Worker [1889/1905] (Croydon: Manifesto Press, 2017). As chair of the education committee in 1920 and deputy education commissar (government minister) from 1929 to 1939 Krupskaya would reform the Soviet education system and develop its librarianship. Together with Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai, Krupskaya founded in 1919 the Women’s Section of the Communist Party (the zhenskii otdel, or ‘Zhenotdel’ for short). Kollontai had worked also as an educator since 1894 and became a Marxist activist some four years later. In 1915, she undertook a four and one-half month speaking tour of the United States, where she gathered research on the local economy and labour relations.

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ulrich lehmann country. New England’s textile mills were the factory system’s successful pioneers. Since spinning and weaving were traditional female domestic occupations, women were the first workers recruited by the mill-owners to operate the new power looms. Considering the subsequent exclusion of women from industrial production in general, it is one of the great ironies of this country’s economic history that the first industrial workers were women. As industrialization advanced, shifting economic production from the home to the factory, the importance of women’s domestic work suffered a systematic erosion. Women were the losers in a double sense: as their traditional jobs were usurped by the burgeoning factories, the entire economy moved away from the home, leaving many women largely bereft of significant economic roles.26

The role of women in producing and consuming fashion turned doubly exploitative and twice as alienating within global capitalist economies since the early nineteenth century. Fashion plays a vital role in the ephemeral but also transformative character of this modernity, due to the confluence of a material given: a particular labour structure, which resulted from accelerated demand for fashionable goods, together with a sociological factor: the objectification of the subject through modern sartorial forms. The dialectic of such production expressed through its negation – that is, through consumption – animates the role of modern fashion. Marx developed in his Grundrisse a dialectic that is fundamental to capitalism and, again, fashion provides the prime example: Consumption produces production in a double way, (1) because a product becomes a real product only by being consumed. For example, a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn . . . Only by disintegrating the product does consumption give the product the finishing stroke;27 for the product is production not as objectified activity, but rather only as 26

27

Davis, ‘The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework’, 277. Women continued, in rural New England as well as urban sectors, to work (often at home) as adjuncts of factory labour or industrial mass production well into the twentieth century. Davis’ statement applies here especially for ‘fashion’ trades from millinery to shoes, embroidery and lace-making. In English in the original text.

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fashion in capitalism object for the active subject; (2) because consumption creates the need for new production, that is it creates the ideal, internally impelling cause for production, which is its presupposition. Consumption creates the motive for the production; it also creates the object which is active in production as determinant aim.28

In consuming fashion, the product of labour ‘disintegrates’: its use value and its direct equivalent value in the labour that had been required to produce it are abstracted. Abstracted insofar as its surplus value bears no relation to the material value of, for example, the raw fibres, the hours spent at the loom, seamstressing in garrets, or in garment sweatshops.29 Equally, it is abstracted in the way clothes and accessories reify the wearer’s body in modernity as a transitory social signifier and gendered object of exchange. With the advent of haute couture in nineteenth-century Paris, ‘fashion leaders’ became the extravagantly attired lovers and wives of politicians, industrial capitalists, and real estate speculators whose wardrobe and sexuality was paid for as part of a highly ritualized social exchange.30 Thus, it was during the reign of Louis Napoléon III that French fashion design consolidated its role in Western markets, having expanded from the historical grounds of late seventeenth-century luxury production of textiles under royal patronage (e.g. silk weaving in Lyon) and the ambassadorial role of pandoras (model dolls in miniature couture) that Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker Rose Bertin sent in the second half of the eighteenth century via carriages across Europe. The nephew of the first Napoléon ascended to power through his bloody coup

28 29

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Marx, Grundrisse, 91 (translation modified). The ‘keystone mark-up’ from wholesale to retail to consumer for mainstream clothes adds up to around 200–250 per cent; see for example Samantha Novick, ‘How to Price Clothing’, 11 December 2019, www.fundingcircle.com/us/reso urces/how-to-price-clothing/ (accessed 18 July 2020) or Emily Farra, ‘What Is the Right Price for Fashion?’, Vogue, 29 June 2020, www.vogue.com/article/what-is -the-right-price-for-fashion (accessed 18 July 2020). The objectification of affluent women as ‘style-leaders’ cannot be evidenced in innovative cuts or new designs for clothes and accessories that historically emerge most often from workwear or military apparel, yet this objectification continues to be purported in the fashion media to establish ‘exclusivity’, that is, extravagant prices for labelled ‘designer fashion’ that is often distributed first to the stylists of celebrities.

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d’état in December 1851 and crowned himself emperor a year later.31 His integration of a dynastic revival into free-market capitalism was reinforced by establishing a series of public engagements at court, where bourgeois nouveaux riches could mix with the reestablished nobility. In this context the emphasis in modernity on the new as eternal recurrence, which was postulated by Baudelaire in the early 1850s, took on a decidedly political meaning, as oldfashioned imperialism was dressed up as contemporary constitutional monarchy. It is only logical that this very period saw the expansion and consolidation of haute couture, when Charles Frederick Worth designed his first dresses for Louis Napoléon’s wife, the Empress Eugénie, as a conduit of bourgeois aspiration to an aristocratic past. Worth’s couture was traditional in its shapes, retaining at first crinolines and waistlines but, under the patronage of the empress, he proposed notable changes that ushered in simpler fabrics and decoration to emphasize and subsequently define the composition of pattern cut and silhouette. An approximation of bourgeois tastes to the representational simulacra of nobility can be found in this instance, when the new and the old fuse in the historicist designs of Worth, which were billed as the latest artistic creations to designate individual objectification of the prominent wearer. The story goes that Empress Eugénie had taken a liking to the young and vivacious Princess Pauline von Metternich, and on that night when the empress noticed her dress (so the princess recounts in her memoirs) the following conversation took place: ‘May I ask you, Madam,’ she enquired, ‘who made you that dress, so marvellously elegant and simple?’ ‘An Englishman, Madam, a star who has arisen in the firmament of fashion,’ the Princess replied. ‘And what is his name?’ ‘Worth.’

31

Marx provided a contemporary exposure of the way in which the archcapitalist royal ascended to his bloodied throne, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon [1851–2], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979), xi, 137–47 and 164–81.

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fashion in capitalism ‘Well,’ concluded the Empress, ‘please ask him to come and see me at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’ ‘He was made, and I was lost,’ quipped Princess Metternich, ‘for from that moment there were no more dresses at 300 francs each.’32

As materialization of taste and sexual politics – both Eugénie de Montijo and Pauline von Metternich determined the marriages to their philandering husbands as ‘alliances’ – Worth’s haute couture has to be designated a precise monetary value, the surplus of which ascends via the social relations it facilitates when worn in public. Disintegrating as ‘finishing stroke’ is the apotheosis of modern fashion: the instant objectification of the subject through sartorial commodities in set socio-economic systems that is elevated to a creative gesture and social signifier (taste), even an aesthetic concept (style).33 Such gesture/signifier/style must be cut short, as its material base requires constant renewal, which, in turn, provides the merciless rhythm for the labour that produces the object for consumption. The ever-changing trends in capitalist cultures provide an abstract rationale that conceals the market behind repeatedly actualized and formalized aesthetics. One might argue that in capitalism any commodity, as distinguished from an object of production, can move between concreteness and abstraction, but in fashion the designing of clothes – the tailoring of the coat – is uniquely placed to simultaneously determine labour as useful, in the abstract, to create a form, as well as transforming the labour incorporated in the woven linen fabric into the value of the coat, which is subjected to the recognition of value in its social form of labour. This, in turn, generates the equivalent value for the commodity vis-à-vis other commodities so that fashion can exist as a system of differentiated social values through the wearing of distinct clothing. Residual sumptuary laws for clothing and accessories (as 32

33

Princesse de Metternich, Souvenirs de la Princesse Pauline de Metternich (1859–1871) (Paris: Plon, 1922), 136. A scathing satire of Worth’s fashion design process can be found in the realism of Émile Zola’s La Curée, in Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris: Lacroix, Verboeckhiven et Cie, 1871), i, 123–5; English translation by A. Goldhammer, The Kill (New York: The Modern Library, 2005); see Lehmann, Fashion and Materialism, 106–12.

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well as hairstyles and make-up) and nineteenth-century classbased conventions of dress therefore only articulate in officious terms the social value of labour that distinguishes fashion commodities through processes of spinning, weaving, tailoring, and styling.

patterns 1: value, (immaterial) labour, and reproduction The assessment of value, in particular that of surplus value, assumes a central role in feminist historical materialism after Marx, as it ties social and physical reproduction to production, and homes in on the forming of social relations. This leads to a processual understanding of political economy in which surplus value is not a quantifiable number but constitutes a relation that a subject embodies in real life at a particular point in time. Yet surplus value, adds Jared Sacks, ‘can only exist as a relation to capital on the basis that it is eventually extracted and turned into capital through the sale of commodities. If this relation is disrupted at any point, surplus-value ceases to exist.’34 Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of political economy originally veered between the definition of surplus value as value which extends beyond the measurable gain that covers the wage of labourer and value that is represented by consumption of goods that do not have primarily use value but are defined as luxuries. In The Accumulation of Capital of 1913 Luxemburg lampoons traditional political economists who believe that ‘the surplus product in a concrete use-form is the reason why the surplus value cannot be usefully employed’ and who tout as remedy for ‘entrepreneurs to devote half of the social labour appropriated as surplus value to the production not of common goods but of luxuries’.35 To today’s readers this sounds eerily familiar, seeing that producers continue to torque their 34

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Jared Sacks, ‘Rethinking Surplus-Value: Recentring Struggle at the Sphere of Reproduction’, Interface, 11/1 (2019), 158. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital [1913] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 235. These luxuries appear for Luxemburg ‘in the form of laces, fashionable carriages and the like’, i.e. fashion commodities targeted in the main at women.

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turnovers to accelerated changes in fashion, reinventing the selfsame commodities for ever more closely defined consumer groups who are identified and targeted by micro-economic trend reports and influencers. For Luxemburg the articulation of surplus value as social relation is profoundly unjust to women. As long as capitalism [Kapitalherrschaft] and its wage system rule, work is only seen as productive when it generates surplus value and capitalist profit. From this point of view the cabaret dancer who with her legs kicks profit into the pockets of the entrepreneur is a productive worker, whereas the vast labouring [Mühsal] of proletarian women and mothers inside the four walls of their homes is regarded as unproductive.36

Dancing, acting, modelling on the catwalk, and other performative labour that is determined through the codification of the subjective body within fashionable cultural expressions, provide here a significant conceptual foundation for the later term immaterial labour. The feminism of Luxemburg, Kollontai, Clara Zetkin, and others, in analysing the hitherto neglected structural distinctions of women’s work (at home and in the workshop/factory) expanded significantly the social concept of labour to prefigure the ‘immaterial’ and ‘affected’ within post-war materialist economic analyses. Some eighty years later Maurizio Lazzarato brought together the feminist expansive definition of ‘social labour’ with the Italian operaismo (workerism) contribution to political economic thought. Lazzarato wrote in 1996: The role of immaterial labour is to promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of communication (and thus in work and consumption). It gives form to and materializes needs, the imaginary, consumer tastes, and so forth, and these products in turn become powerful producers of needs, images, and tastes. The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labour . . . does not produce the physical capacity of labour power; instead, it transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labour produces first and foremost a ‘social relationship’ (a relationship of 36

Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Frauenwahlrecht und Klassenkampf’, in Clara Zetkin (ed.), “Frauenwahlrecht”, Propagandaschrift zum II. sozialdemokratischen Frauentag, Stuttgart, 12 May 1912 (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1912), 9.

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ulrich lehmann innovation, production, and consumption). Only if it succeeds in this production does its activity have an economic value. This activity makes immediately apparent something that material production had ‘hidden’, namely, that labour produces not only commodities, but first and foremost it produces the capital relation.37

In fashion ‘the capital relation’ objectifies the female body, by codifying its reproductive function especially through the physical expression thereof, through constantly renewed shapes, for instance padded-out forms, fabrics that cling to the body, decorated skin, exposed secondary sexual characteristics. Surplus value is understood as social relations that are capitalistic; they are produced and reproduced as labour power while referencing the commodity that ultimately determines the social relation. The extraction of the labour power works because the surplus as social relation is bound into the commodity fetishism promoted by fashion, where the exchange value between goods is determined by the way in which hairstyles, clothing or make-up position the wearer socially, culturally, in terms or race and gender. Yet this extraction obfuscates an actual economic process. Catharine MacKinnon reveals it succinctly: ‘Like the value of a commodity, women’s sexual desirability is fetishized: it is made to appear a quality of the object itself, spontaneous and inherent, independent of the social relation which creates it, uncontrolled by the force that requires it.’38 The display or, indeed, concealing of desirability, particularly in womenswear has a complex history in capitalism. On the one hand, as had been analysed by Luxemburg, Kollontai, and Davis, domestic labour remained concealed as ‘unproductive’ (while reproduction of the labour force through childbearing and childrearing was assumed into surplus value), and therefore clothing associated with it was defined by its use value: the aprons, roomy skirts, and flat shoes 37

38

Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 137. Catharine A. MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7/3 (1982), 540.

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worn by working-class housewives and parlour maids alike. On the other hand, as dominant narratives in costume history – within museum displays as much as illustrated volumes of preserved objects and images – had intended to show, the cultural significance of fashion apparently lay elsewhere: in the luxuries that objectify women for display – and mark them out as economically dependent on male capitalists who profit from the surplus value generated thereby – in economic terms as well as in social relations. Such complicity between economic and cultural value systems is emphasized in feminism that combines historical materialism with (post)structuralist thought. These ideas, delineated by Elizabeth Armstrong in her recent survey on ‘Marxist and Socialist Feminisms’, stressed the necessary porousness of conceptual divisions between reproduction and production. Marxist feminists demanded a more careful analysis of how the affective, libidinal and moral realms functioned in the service of capitalism. They sought to clarify the relationship between value, particularly exchange value and surplus value, and values, including ethics and use value, in capitalism to better attend to the desires and needs beyond that system.39

Fashion assumes a complex position within this value-based nexus of morals, political economy, sexual roles, images, and reproductions of culture in capitalism, due to the aforementioned duality of a mode of living: the exposure to constantly renewed, desirous commodities, and a mode of production: the concrete making of textiles, garments, and accessories wherein functions of the sartorial cover or accessory are abstracted progressively to a cypher within social relations. An ‘etymological sanction’ of text as textile can be found in weaving metaphors that animate canonical writing from Plato to Marcel Proust and beyond,40 while the analysis of value in its 39

40

Elisabeth Armstrong, ‘Marxist and Socialist Feminisms’, in Nancy Naples (ed.), Companion to Feminist Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 43. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote that ‘it seems that cooking is a better figure than weaving when one speaks of the text, although the latter has etymological sanction. Lifting the lid, Marx discovers that the pot of the economic is forever on the boil. What cooks (in all senses of this enigmatic expression) is Value.’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value’, Diacritics, 15/4 (Marx after Derrida) (1985), 74. On weaving, see also Ulrich Lehmann, ‘Making as Knowing: Epistemology and

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connected contexts of political economy and culture points at the more abstract ‘fashion’ that needs to be returned to its materialist fabric, away from ontology or phenomenology, via political praxis. Socialist feminists took the structural tenets of Marx, as well as Friedrich Engels’ book on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) as starting points to develop the required fusion of theory and praxis. Reproductive rights and suffrage – an applied practice of political economy – were combined with theoretical analysis, which was grounded in the role that unpaid labour (later, as we will see, finding its equivalent in the formulations of affected and immaterial labour) played in the political economy of capitalism. The combination of female factory labour in the textile and clothing industry (up to 70 per cent in industrialized countries at the end of the nineteenth century) and the social production of labour through the part that bourgeois women, especially, played in the performative consumption of fashions (luxury, semi-luxury, niceties), was mapped onto reproductive labour to arrive at an interplay between production and consumption that situated Marx’s bilateral connection within the reification of the subject. This move, anticipating the later function of reification in critical theory and analyses of the culture industry in the 1940s and 1950s, expanded on the political aspect of economic thought by introducing emancipation as significant driving force of change.

patterns 2: materialism after marx Georgi Plekhanov,41 an astute analyst and chronicler of materialism after Marx, opened his book on Art and Social Life (1912) thus: ‘It should be observed, in general, that the effort to assume

41

Technique in Craft’, Journal of Modern Craft, 5/2 (2012), 149–64; and Lehmann, Tigersprung, 207–11. Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918) was the first Marxist theoretician to anticipate the emergence of the working class in Russia as a revolutionary social force; he raised critical questions about the relationship between the struggle for political democracy, the overthrow of the capitalist class, and the establishment of socialism. He was also the foremost defender of philosophical materialism, an expert on dialectic and post-Hegelian thought across Europe, and wrote extensively on the need to reconcile materialism as a philosophy with political praxis.

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a definite outward appearance always reflects the social relationships of the given period. An interesting sociological inquiry could be written on this theme.’42 Alas, Plekhanov did not find the time to undertake such an enquiry and it was left to bourgeois, antimaterialist (and exclusively male) sociologists like Gabriel Tarde, Herbert Spencer, Georg Simmel, or Émile Durkheim to follow into the terrain of fashion.43 Yet the formalism of such late nineteenthcentury sociology of clothing, in its ready acceptance of the economic system of capitalism, focused in the main on signifiers of class affiliation or on subjective gestures in modernity, and therefore could not hope to probe the structural significance of fashion. The Italian Marxist Antoni Gramsci44 developed the wideranging concept of hegemonies, founded in philosophical materialism and political economy, in order to determine power relations as spheres of ideological influence and pure social consent. ‘[T]hough hegemony is ethico-political’, wrote Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks of 1932–4, ‘it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity’.45 In this context social behaviour becomes a constituent for repeated historical divisions and class struggle – patterns within historical materialism – and fashion as its outward appearance can assume structural value. In his essay from the Prison Notebooks ‘Sincerity (or Spontaneity) and 42

43

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Georgi Plekhanov, Art and Social Life, chapter 1, www.marxists.org/arch ive/plekhanov/1912/art/ch01.htm (accessed 5 January 2021). See for example Herbert Spencer, ‘On Manners and Fashion’ [1854], in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (London: Williams and Norgate, 1891), iii, 1–31; George Darwin, ‘Development in Dress’, Macmillan Magazine, 26 (September 1872), 410–16; Rudolf von Jhering, ‘Die Mode’, in Der Zweck im Recht [1877/1883] (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1905), 180–9; Émile Durkheim, ‘La Science positive de la morale en Allemagne’ [pt. 1], Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 12/24 (1887), 33–58; Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation (New York: Holt [orig. ed. 1890] 1903), 189–255; Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’ [1904], in On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 317–18. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was a neo-Marxist philosopher and Communist politician, who developed his ideas away from economic determinism towards sociological and cultural interpretations, linguistics, and education. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Some Theoretical and Practical Aspects of “Economism”’ [1932–4], in The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916– 1935 (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 211–12.

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Discipline’, Gramsci used the dialectic of the ‘objective and universal fact’ as negating itself in diverse expressions of free will and conformism. What is ‘real conformism’, what is the most useful and freest form of behaviour that is ‘rational’ in that it obeys ‘necessity’? In other words, what is ‘necessity’? Everyone is led to make of himself the archetype of ‘fashion’ and ‘sociality’, to offer himself as the ‘model’. Therefore, sociality or conformism is the result of a cultural (but not only cultural) struggle; it is an ‘objective’ or universal fact, just as the ‘necessity’ on which the edifice of liberty is built cannot but be objective and universal.46

Fashion constantly becomes yet always is a factor of socioeconomic and political existence. As such it is objective, despite the apparent subjectivity of the people sporting the latest trend in hair, make-up, dress, food, or mode of transport, in order to distinguish themselves. It exists as the repetitive assertion of abstract value, born from commodity production in capitalist economies. Fashion’s temporality therefore resides within its objective consistency as well as in its repeated renewal of styles to maintain elevated levels of consumption. Analysing fashion, the poet Baudelaire had issued thus a dialectic demand avant la lettre: ‘to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory’.47 Like Gramsci, the cultural critic Walter Benjamin would become a victim of fascism; not withered away in a prison cell but hunted across occupied France, to commit suicide at the foothill of the Pyrenees in 1940. Benjamin used Marx’s left-Hegelian philosophy and dialectical materialism for a fragmented analysis of the culture of Paris in the latter half of the nineteenth century – for him the foundation and site of capitalist modernity. Historical repetition and Hegelian leap, Baudelaire’s La Passante and the streetwalker, arcades and department stores, all conflated within Benjamin’s research, and fashion provided the red thread that was running 46

47

Antonio Gramsci, ‘Sincerity (or Spontaneity) and Discipline’ [1932–5], in The Gramsci Reader, 400. Charles Baudelaire, ‘IV. Modernity’ [1863], in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 12.

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through his work. Following Marx, fashion for Benjamin was simultaneously concrete production of objects and represented ‘the hell of commodities’ that reified social life: ‘in that which is newest the face of the world never alters, this newest remains, in every respect, the same. This constitutes the eternity of hell.’48 Fashion’s temporality permits the materialist a complex assessment of history. It offers an alternative to the perception of steady, technological and economic advances that positivist philosophies and liberal historicism want to affirm for the capitalist system, in which social revolutions are seen as interruptions of linear historical progress. The dialectic of the ephemeral and eternal in modernity and its prime mover, fashion, which Benjamin adopted from Baudelaire and Marx, results in a materialist historiography, exemplified by the ‘dialectical image’49 of the tiger’s leap: History is object of a structure whose site is not homogenous and empty time but one filled by now-time [Jetztzeit]. For Robespierre the Rome of antiquity was thus charged with now-time and blasted from the continuum of history. The French Revolution regarded itself as Rome reincarnate. It quoted ancient Rome as fashion quotes a past attire. Fashion has the scent of the modern wherever it stirs in the thicket of what has been. It is the tiger’s leap [Tigersprung] into the past. Yet this leap occurs in an arena commanded by the ruling class. The very same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which Marx has understood as the revolution.50

Here, political economy meets historical materialist conception. Patterns of structural, politico-economic conflicts are repeated across history and the reification of the subject through fashioncommodities is proposed by Benjamin to break the continuum,

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Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [1935–40] (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) [convolute S1, 5], 544. This term was first used by Theodor W. Adorno in a letter to Benjamin, dated 2 August 1935, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 495. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ [1939/40], in Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), iv, 395 (translation modified); see Lehmann, Tigersprung, xvii–xviii and 200–78; and Lehmann, Fashion and Materialism, 35–68.

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leap back in time and bring past events into the present. This measure is a political activation, a revolution in the sense of revolving to a point of origin, and it is fitting indeed that dialectical materialism uses a signifier most dear to the bourgeois – her and his contemporary style in dress, transport, food, housing, etc. – as lever to prise loose the cemented capitalist conception of historical progress. For change in fashion is anything but; it is the constant reproduction of abstracted labour and value, as well as the concrete production of commodities to shape the social appearance of the subject, and thus the eternal recurrence of the new in the guise of commodified tradition. Benjamin’s focus on fashion as concrete practice of styling commodities and of delineating mutable aesthetic preferences found its echo in the neo-materialist ‘Frankfurt School’ of social research. Benjamin’s interlocutor for the Arcades Project, Theodor W. Adorno, drew together his late friend’s unfinished excerpts on fashion for his own last and incomplete book, Aesthetic Theory. Prefacing fashion’s ‘embeddedness in capitalist industry’ and its ‘dependency on the profit motive’ and concluding with the by now almost canonical reference to Baudelaire, Adorno recapitulated: Fashion cannot be separated from art as neatly as would suit bourgeois art religion. Ever since the aesthetic subject polemically distanced itself from society and its prevailing spirit, art communicates with this objective spirit, however untrue it is, through fashion. Fashion is certainly no longer characterised by that spontaneity and simple originality that was earlier, and probably wrongly, attributed to it: It is entirely manipulated and in no way a direct adaptation to the demands of the marketplace, even if these demands are sedimented in it and the consensus of the marketplace is still requisite for fashion to succeed. Because, however, manipulation in the age of monopoly capitalism is itself the prototype of ruling social relations of production, fashion’s octroi itself represents a socially objective power. If, in one of the most remarkable passages of his Aesthetics, Hegel defined the task of art as the appropriation of the alien,51 fashion – doubtful of any possibility of such spiritual reconciliation – 51

See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), i, 31.

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fashion in capitalism appropriates alienation itself. For fashion, alienation becomes the living model of a social being-thus-and-not-otherwise [So-und-nichtanders-Sein], to which it surrenders as if in ecstasy.52

Alienation of the subject in the face of objectifying social conditions of labour is rendered dialectical in fashion, as the consumption of the commodity, which surrounds and envelops the subject, generates its production. Fashion heralds consciously, yet often veiled its alienating powers as corrective to pretences of modernist, bourgeois subjectivity. From a materialist viewpoint, fashion’s position in capitalism is that of a double agent: producing its outward form yet wilfully revealing its inner workings of objectification, reification, and alienation. ‘If art, as semblance, is the clothing of an invisible body’, concluded Adorno, ‘fashion is clothing as the absolute’53 – and thus in obvious analogy to abstract labour and value.54

patterns 3: social labour and the social factory Historical materialist research diversified in the post-war years in Western Europe, in the context of continued imperialism, Cold War divisional politics, and world systems as sets of mechanisms that redistribute surplus value from the raw materials-producing and cheap labour periphery to the industrialized core. With the demise of real-existing socialism in Eastern Europe and international social 52

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Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory [1970] (London: Continuum, 2002), 316. Ibid., 317. The structuralist Marxist Henri Lefebvre also provides an astute reading of the temporal structure of capitalist modernity and fashion via Baudelaire and Benjamin in ‘What Is Modernity?’ [1962], in Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, September 1959–May 1961 (London: Verso, 1995), 168–237. Writers like Michel Butor (cf. ‘Fashion and the Modern’ [1969], Art in Translation, 7/3 (2015), 266–81), the Situationists (e.g. Raoul Vaneigem, ‘Impossible Realisation or Power as the Sum of Seductions’, in The Revolution of Everyday Life: 1963–1965, 50–78, free download at https:// theanarchistlibrary.org/library/raoul-vaneigem-the-revolution-of-everyday-l ife.pdf), and Roland Barthes (cf. ‘History and Sociology of Clothing: Some Methodological Observations’ [1957], in The Language of Fashion (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 3–20) followed suit.

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democracies, capitalism has expanded its systemic monopoly across the globe, and its analyses therefore share in the critique of global social rituals, communication networks, and appearances, significantly including fashions.55 Chakravorty Spivak connected the traditional Marxist analysis of surplus value as driven by technological change and Luxemburg’s tenets on the mirage of luxuries averting economic crises in capitalism (‘As it happens, luxury is in fact an old familiar invention of capitalist society, and still there are recurrent crises’56), with colonialism as capital’s expansionist escape route. Since the production and realization of relative surplus-value, usually attendant upon technological progress and the socialized growth of consumerism, increase capital expenditure in an indefinite spiral, there is the contradictory drive within capitalism to produce more absolute and less relative surplus-value as part of its crisis management. In terms of this drive, it is in the ‘interest’ of capital to preserve the comprador theatre in a state of relatively primitive labour legislation and environmental regulation. Further, since the optimal relationship between fixed and variable capital has been disrupted by the accelerated rate of obsolescence of the former under the rapid progress within telecommunications research and the attendant competition, the comprador theatre is also often obliged to accept scrapped and out-of-date machinery from the post-industrialist economies.57

The ’comprador theatre’ is the political-economic space that lies outside the globalized North but remains dominated by its agents (compradors) who engage in investment, trade, and economic or political exploitation. For the fashion industry, self-anointed ‘luxury’ brands have developed a system in which they advance a discourse of a specific localized tradition (e.g. in northern Italy) for the making of expensive fashionable goods, while the reality sees low-waged labour in the comprador theatre, with scant worker 55

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See for example Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); or Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown (eds.), Marxism and the Critique of Value (Chicago and Alberta: MCM, 2014). Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 235. Spivak, ‘Scattered Speculations’, 84.

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representation, security, or benefits, producing these goods, only to be packaged and labelled as ‘Made in Italy’, to account for the exorbitant surplus value through cultural capital.58 In the 1950s and 1960s in Italy, autonomous Marxist thinkers developed further under the banner of operaismo the concept of ‘social labour’.59 For them capital pushed towards a greater socialization of labour that went beyond extending of the immediate process of production towards a complete redefinition of the category of productive labour. In it, all movements of the circulation process, significantly including reproduction, now are productive of value. The distinction between productive and non-productive labour becomes much less distinct as it had been in previous forms of industrial capitalism. Reproduction – an aspect that also occupied neo-Marxists like Louis Althusser60 – was returned to the socialized body of the worker, belatedly acknowledging the demand that feminists had drawn from Marx before, to consider reproduction in its confluence of the material and social with the biological and familial. Silvia Frederici, part of the first generation of autonomous Marxist feminists in Italy, looked back on the essential redefinition of reproduction. Not only did feminists establish that the reproduction of labour power involves a far broader range of activities than the consumption of commodities, since food must be prepared, clothes have to be washed, bodies have to be stroked and cared for. Their recognition of the importance of reproduction and women’s domestic labour for capital accumulation led to a rethinking of 58

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See Ulrich Lehmann, ‘The Luxury Duality: From Economic Fact to Cultural Capital’, in John Armitage and Joan Roberts (eds.), Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 67–87, esp. 72–6. Mario Tronti’s Operai e Capitale (Turin: Einaudi, 1966); in English the collection of his essays in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (London: Red Notes/CSE Books, 1979) are useful as introduction; as is Raniero Panzieri’s essay ‘The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx Versus the Objectivists’ [1961], in Phil Slater (ed.), Outlines of a Critique of Technology (London: Ink Links, 1980), 49–60. See for example Louis Althusser’s ‘What Is a Mode of Production?’, in On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses [1995] (London: Verso, 2014), 18–52.

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ulrich lehmann Marx’s categories and a new understanding of the history and fundamentals of capitalist development and the class struggle. Starting in the early 1970s, a feminist theory took shape that radicalized the theoretical shift which the Third Worldist critiques of Marx had inaugurated, confirming that capitalism is not necessarily identifiable with waged, contractual work, arguing that, in essence, it is unfree labour, and revealing the umbilical connection between the devaluation of reproductive work and the devaluation of women’s social position.61

Reproduction is not only key to sustaining a working populace and defining mass production in far-flung factories, but also expressive within the conceptual framework for fashion that returns the same past appearances and modes of existence to the immediate present. In capitalism, fashion reproduces the alienated body (e.g. the sexualized woman, the infantilized non-Westerner, the invisible manual labourer) as a commodity that needs to be restyled at distinct intervals like fashion weeks, global movie premieres and music award ceremonies, international art biennials, etc. Fashion consumption for production is reproduced materially in increasingly cheap objects (‘fast fashion’) and socially in recurring style movements (‘classics’ of bourgeois uniformity like suits or little black dresses, or (male) ‘working-class chic’ like jeans and white t-shirts). Here, the workerist notion of ‘value as class relationship’62 is important, as it recast Marx’s abstraction of the linen’s and coat’s exchange values as structural foundation. For fashion, value is expressed not in the material worth of fabrics or tailoring expertise but in the class relationship that is reproduced: ‘exclusive’ designer fashion signifies a class affiliation (or aspiration) as distinct from sartorial commodities that emerged from proletarian culture

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Silvia Frederici, ‘The Reproduction of Labour Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution’ [2008], in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press [orig. ed. 2012], 2020), 106–7. See also Tithi Bhattacharya, ‘Mapping Social Reproduction Theory’, in Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.), Social Reproduction Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 1–18. Antonio Negri, ‘Marx on Cycle and Crisis’ [1968], in Revolution Retrieved: Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects (1967– 83) (London: Red Notes, 1988), 22.

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(workwear), although both are very often produced in the same factory by the same workers, with the same machines. Marxist economists in Italy and France – countries where the fashion industry acts as an engine for GDP growth patterns – have engaged in the analyses of fashion monopolies that developed on the basis of local production of textiles and clothes towards global financial speculation and investments, realizing in business strategies the relationship between concrete and abstract labour and value that Marx had postulated originally. One prominent study concerns the Benetton family of textile knitters in the Veneto whose financial holding company expanded to become, among other things, the largest private landowner in Argentina and Italy’s major road operator. In 1993 economist Yann Moulier Boutang translated into French research on Benetton by political philosopher Antonio Negri that covered the company’s development across the 1970s and 1980s. Benetton was founded on a past, elevated level of conflictuality, which stems from the habitual exile movement (literally, flight from its dependence on industrial wage labour in the large factories of the Milan-Turin-Genoa triangle). Its model of financial constitution within a large group, however, is based on the internal logic of the market, while its productivity was based largely on the rearrangement (recovery) of industrious work collectives who managed their labour relations directly at no cost to the company. [Benetton] incorporates a new value through the speed with which it transmits to the manufacturing system the evolution of taste and the determination of fashion.63

The speed of production, ostensibly generated by rapid changes in taste or fast fashions, is imposed by Benetton on small-to-medium suppliers in Italy or on global sites of production which, like collapsed Bangladeshi clothing factories, circumvent local labour 63

Yann Moulier Boutang, ‘Introduction’, in Maurizio Lazzarato, Yann Moulier Boutang, Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Santilli, Des Entreprises pas comme les autres: Benetton en Italie, Le Sentier à Paris (Paris: Publisud, 1993), 22. Negri’s study on pp. 30–130, entitled ‘Les PME italiennes, l’exemple Benetton et le nouveau chef d’entreprise en Europe’, had been completed in 1988 for a research project and while the Italian original was not published, the economist Yann Moulier Boutang later translated the extended essay for the above volume.

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regulations. These entities not only compete with each other but also often exist on credit issued by Benetton’s leasing and factoring subsidiary Bencom S.r.l. (founded in 1987). This financial model has been echoed across the 1990s and 2000s by global fashion conglomerates like Kering or LMVH. When fashion expands to an abstract codification of economic and social life, a move in focus from material goods, that still proclaim certain use value, towards commodities, whose exchange value is determined openly by media strategies and dividends to shareholder, is only logical. The influence of operaismo that had defined work away from wage labour to all types of social work, as well as the structural transformation across economic sectors of companies like Benetton, manifest a larger trend towards what economists like Lazzarato define as immaterial labour. The social and technological changes post-1970 brought about labour that produces increasingly informational and cultural content of the commodity. Lazzarato describes the shifts that have been taking place in workers’ labour processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labour are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity, immaterial labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’ – in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.64

Here, fashion’s temporality creates its own field of expertise that engages in tracing and tracking change in order to establish surplus value for information gathering by cognitive capitalism (such as tech companies, social media conglomerates, the surveillance industry) that allows for the instantaneous commodification of personal data.65 The preferences in modes of consumption and types of 64 65

Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour’, 142. See economic studies like Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008) or, more liberal and populist, Shosbana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).

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commodities that fashion propels along create an alienation of people not simply from their labour but from their personal profiles that become the property of cognitive capitalists. The more and more quickly we consume, the more data becomes available for disposal by service providers, social networks, and digital platforms. Fashion accelerates the trend towards a complete commodification of all spatio-temporal measures of socio-economic existence, including our homes (to be styled in ‘neutral’ contemporaneity and rented out on apartment booking sites) and our labour time (trend-dependent gig economies). One of the original workerists, Mario Tronti, expanded on this process as the ‘social factory’: The more capitalist development advances, that is to say the more the production of relative surplus-value penetrates everywhere, the more the circuit production-distributionexchange-consumption inevitably develops . . . At the highest level of capitalist development social relations become moments of the relations of production, and the whole society becomes an articulation of production. In short, all of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over all of society.

We return thus to value as crucial for understanding fashion in capitalism. In recent decades it has been analysed anew by Wertkritik (critique of value), alongside a new generation of post-Marxists and post-materialists. Wertkritik focuses on the socio-economic insights that Marx unfolded in his critique of political economy: the concept of modernity, associated with the ‘hell of commodities’ that it produced, coupled with the concept of the value of commodities that self-valorizes, constantly striving for its own increase and always reproducing itself. This critique of value espouses the idea of the ‘automatic subject’ of society, constituted by human beings in their daily actions, but at the same time absolutely objectifying them and rendering them mere functionaries within an anonymous, abstracted process that is out of their control. Following on from Marx’s analysis of the ‘fetish character of commodities’, Wertkritik highlights the fetishist constitution of modern

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society, where the production of, for example, objects with use value, social relationships, or temporal fashion, is not consciously determined but has outsourced control to selfvalorizing value. Modern society has placed itself under the rule of the automatic subject.66 Wertkritik-philosopher Anselm Jappe said in a recent interview that Marx’s historical definition of concrete and abstract labour has revealed now that a major contradiction [is] lurking inside the process of valueproduction: only living labour – labour in the act of its execution – creates value. Technology does not. However, competition between various capitals also forces every owner of capital to use technology as much as possible in order to increase the productivity of his workers. This allows him to gain more profit in the short term. However, the value contained in every single commodity also diminishes. Only a continuous increase in the total mass of commodities can compensate this decrease in the value of each commodity, but this mechanism creates the insanity of production for the sake of production, with all of the terrible ecological consequences that we now know about.67

conclusion This production for the sake of production is obviously the eternal recurrence of the new that Baudelaire and Benjamin had observed in the confluence of mode et modernité; fashion in modern capitalism as the self-valorizing impetus of the commodity to constantly exchange production for consumption and vice versa. Alienation leads to the feverish shopping for fashionable commodities that are but the restyled reproduction of old things. The fetish of the commodity has met its self-fulfilling prophecy of

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For an introduction, see Klaus Kemper, ‘Marx, Wertkritik and the Illusions of State, Politics and Law’ (3 March 2020), https://verfassungsblog.de/marxwertkritik-and-the-illusions-of-state-politics-and-law/ (accessed 29 June 2020); and Larsen et al. (eds.), Marxism. Anselm Jappe in conversation with Alastair Hemmens, ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’ (The Brooklyn Rail, September 2015), https://brooklynrail.org/2015/ 09/field-notes/anselm-jappe-with-alastair-hemmens (accessed 29 June 2020).

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reproducing social relations in our capitalist economies as the eternal, inescapable cycle of fashion. Capitalism is but one critical context for fashion; sexual politics, the social construction of race, or radical feminism are others. Equally, Marxist political economy is but one critique of capitalism. Yet I would argue that the need to establish corporate fashion as instrumental in assessing capitalist economies and, correspondingly, the need to understand fashion in Marxist, historical materialist contexts becomes ever more pressing. The environmental impact of the material production of commodities whose promotion and consumption are propelled by fashion, as well as the social impact of fashion’s abstraction, its commodifying and alienating powers that reach deep into every aspect of our mediated existence have become terribly clear. New thinkers and makers should look at the historical lineage of Marxist critiques of fashion to develop innovative modes in assessing its structure, rather than remaining preoccupied with its constant reproductions, appearances, and commercial narratives. Readers of this Global History (as much as this writer) might want to consider the complicity of their own actions and thought in sustaining the present fashion system. Only a radical reassessment of fashion through its historical materialist position can help to develop its future as materially sustainable and socially responsible.

select bibliography Davis, Angela, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983). Frederici, Silvia, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2020 [2012]). Kemper, Klaus, ‘Marx, Wertkritik and the Illusions of State, Politics and Law’ (3 March 2020). https://verfassungsblog.de/marx-wertkritik-and -the-illusions-of-state-politics-and-law/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Lazzarato, Maurizio, Yann Moulier Boutang, Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Santilli, Des Entreprises pas comme les autres: Benetton en Italie, Le Sentier à Paris (Paris: Publisud, 1993). Lefebvre, Henri, Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, September 1959–May 1961 (London: Verso, 1995). Lehmann, Ulrich, Fashion and Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

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ulrich lehmann Luxemburg, Rosa, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951 [1913]). MacKinnon, Catharine A., ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7/3 (Spring 1982), 515–44. Marx, Karl, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. iii (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975). Marx, Karl, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) (London: Allen Lane, 1973 [1857–8]). Negri, Antonio, Revolution Retrieved: Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects (1967–83) (London: Red Notes, 1988). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value’, Diacritics, 15/4 (Marx after Derrida) (Winter 1985), 83–93. Tronti, Mario, Operai e Capitale (Turin: Einaudi, 1966). Vaneigem, Raoul, The Revolution of Everyday Life: 1963–1965 [1967]. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/raoul-vaneigem-the-revolu tion-of-everyday-lifepdf (accessed 25 April 2023). Virno, Paolo and Michael Hardt (eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

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FASHION AND YOUTH IN WESTERN SOCIETIES Street Style and Race, c. 1830–1940 vivienne richmond

These ‘B’hoys’ had fashions of their own, which they adhered to with all the tenacity of a reigning belle; they were the most consummate dandies of the day, though they affected to look upon a Broadway swell with most decided contempt.1

Abram Dayton was unequivocal that, in the 1830s, the Bowery Boys (or B’hoys) of his native New York consciously adopted a distinct dress style, quite different from that of ‘the centre of fashion’, Broadway.2 Named for the street over which they reigned in lower Manhattan’s Five Points neighbourhood – ‘a hell-mouth of infamy and woe’ – the Bowery Boys were labouring men, many of them apprentices, who took great pride in their appearance.3 Nineteenth-century cities teemed with young people and the Bowery Boys are but one group of urban youths that, lacking the personal or vicarious status symbols of elite peers – money, profession, property, family pedigree – used distinctive dress and transgressive behaviour to challenge and differentiate themselves from the mainstream, express identity, assert agency, and show group allegiance. And while a uniform dress style potentially erodes

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Abram C. Dayton, Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), 217. [George G. Foster], New York in Slices: by An Experienced Carver (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1849), 8. Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001), 1.

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individual identity, for many of the young people discussed in this chapter, personal identity was centred on membership of a particular group and the visual advertisement of this through adoption of the group’s dress style.4 These groups help to dispel the common belief that a connection between proletarian youth and fashion began with the post-Second World War emergence of ‘spectacular’ subcultures. But discussion of them must first separate past and present-day context and terminology. Since the 1950s youth fashion has come to mean the development of clothing lines specifically targeting a newly affluent, non-elite adolescent market and the spectacular subcultures, though reacting against the fashion industry, were nevertheless commodified by it.5 In this chapter, ‘youth’ refers to people in their teens and early twenties, mostly unmarried and without dependants, but in the vast majority of cases with very little disposable income. In discussion of the nineteenth century, ‘fashion’ refers quite simply to a mode of dress and bodily adornment – accompanied by a particular stance, gait, and language – adopted at a particular time and place by the members of a group to visually distinguish themselves. It has no connection with the nascent commercial fashion system. ‘Street style’ is used not in the (controversial) postmodern sense which implies a direct, if ambiguous, relationship with the fashion industry, but because the street was, until at least the 1930s, where labouring-class youths spent most leisure (and much working) time and was by default their primary site of sartorial display.6 The histories of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century street groups or gangs, or of those in specific countries, have

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Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 136. Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 193–4; Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1991 [1979]), 95. Ted Polhemus, ‘Street Style’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), The Berg Companion to Fashion (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 652–4; Bloomsbury Fashion Central, http://dx.doi.org.ucreative.idm.oclc.org/10.5040/9781474264716 .0014360 (accessed 19 May 2021); Sophie Woodward, ‘The Myth of Street Style’, Fashion Theory, 13/1 (2009), 83–101; Breward, Culture of Fashion, 217.

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previously been told individually.7 But considering them collectively and chronologically reveals a new narrative in which acute sartorial consciousness plays a continuous and geographically widespread role in the way that largely disenfranchised young people – particularly men – strove to establish a place in the adult world. It also reveals colonialism as a key driver and race as an increasingly significant factor in the evolution of their street style. This chapter addresses the collective self-fashioning of non-elite youth in the United States, Britain, Australia, and France between the 1830s and the 1940s. The first part traces the nineteenthcentury spread of an international white male street style transmitted through the maritime transport of goods and people for colonial expansion, settlement, and trade. It was based on a model of hardy masculinity which valorized violence, in contrast with a decreasing use of physical violence among bourgeois men.8 Its emergence is examined through the Bowery Boys of New York, the British scuttlers, peaky blinders and hooligans, the Australian larrikins, and the Parisian apaches, to demonstrate the vast geographical reach of this sartorial dissemination and its links to colonial expansion. That these youth groups were white is evident

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See, for example, Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Melissa Bellanta, Larrikins: A History (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2012); Carl Chinn, Peaky Blinders: The Real Story (London: John Blake Publishing, 2019); Andrew Davies, City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013); Andrew Davies, The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers, Britain’s First Youth Cult (Preston: Milo Books, 2009); Linda España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’ Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s–1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); James C. Howell, The History of Street Gangs in the United States: Their Origins and Transformation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015); Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983); Kathy Peiss, Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Michelle Perrot, ‘Dans le Paris de la Belle Epoque, les “Apaches”, premieres bandes de jeunes’, ERES: la lettre de l’enfance et de l’adolescence, 67 (2007), 71–8; Mina Roces, ‘“These Guys Came Out Looking Like Movie Actors”: Filipino Dress and Consumer Practices in the United States, 1920s–1930s’, Pacific Historical Review, 85 (2016), 532–76. John Tosh, ‘Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800–1914’, Journal of British Studies, 44/2 (2005), 334.

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in visual imagery but in the textual sources, written by white authors for a white readership, it is taken for granted. The apaches serve also to demonstrate the ingrained nature of assumed white racial superiority and the ‘barbarity’ of the colonized, their soubriquet appropriating the name of a persecuted Native American people to instantly conjure an image of ‘uncivilized’ savagery. The chapter continues with a brief examination of the dress of the gang members’ female counterparts. This is harder to trace because the contemporary sources, produced by men in patriarchal societies, focus on male street gangs. Authors who did consider young females were prejudicial, presenting them stereotypically as mere adjuncts to the male gang members, peculiarly deviant and sartorially vulgar. The first section closes with consideration of the ways in which these young men and women acquired their clothing and the symbiotic relationship between street style and the popular culture of theatre and music hall. These entertainments commonly featured racist tropes, echoing and fostering white street gangs’ increasing derogation, violence against and cultural appropriation of people of colour. But in the early twentieth century, theatre and music hall were superseded by the arrival of film, the focus of the second part of the chapter. The spotlight switches from colonizer to colonized, from the street style of white youth to the dress of young people of colour for whom sartorial magnificence fostered self-esteem, unity, and agency in the face of hostility. The focus is America from where, as Stella Bruzzi explains in Chapter 26, Hollywood cast its influence across the globe. Its power as a source of vestimentary inspiration for young people beyond its shores is demonstrated through the example of male migrant workers from the Philippines, an American colony in the 1930s, when these young men were drawn to the United States by the glamour of Hollywood style and the false promise of prosperity. That Hollywood also aided the international dissemination of Black style and culture is demonstrated via the zoot suit which originated among young East Coast African Americans and was reinterpreted by West Coast Mexican Americans. But cinema was also duplicitous, fanning the flames of racism and racial violence associated with such perceived sartorial audacity. Ultimately,

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however, zoot-suit style triumphed, becoming a global symbol of cool among young ‘hep-cats’ of all races.9

street gangs and street style In the nineteenth century, the cities of Western industrializing countries expanded dramatically, becoming home to millions of migrants from within and beyond their national borders. Overcrowded living quarters were the norm and the street, where everyone was on display, was the routine place of congregation for young men. Youth gangs proliferated, and joining a gang meant adopting its dress code and the values it represented.10 In New York, for example, the population of some 60,000 in 1800 increased tenfold by mid-century while inflation and high unemployment lowered labourers’ incomes.11 Here in the 1830s emerged the ‘eminently clannish’ Bowery Boys whose dress comprised a: black, straight, broad-brimmed hat . . . a large shirt collar turned down and loosely fastened . . . a black frock-coat with skirts extending below the knee; a flashy satin or velvet vest, cut so low as to display the entire bosom of a shirt, often embroidered; pantaloons tight to the knee, thence gradually swelling in size to the bottom, so as nearly to conceal a foot usually of most ample dimensions.12

They also sported a distinctive hairstyle, closely cropped at the back, with the front locks grown long and ‘matted by a lavish application of bear’s grease, the ends tucked under so as to form a roll, and brushed until they shone’ (Figure 23.1).13

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According to Cab Calloway’s Catalogue: A ‘Hepster’s’ Dictionary of some ‘150 “Harlemese” or “jive” terms . . . more than half relating directly to swing music’ (first edition 1938 to sixth edition 1944), a ‘hep-cat’ was ‘a guy who knows what it’s all about’ in terms of both music and style. ‘Bibliography’, American Speech, 14/2 (1939), 140. Jeffrey Fagan, ‘Gangs, Drugs, and Neighborhood Change’, in C. Ronald Huff (ed.), Gangs in America, 2nd edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 39–40. Elliott J. Gorn, ‘“Good-Bye Boys, I Die a True American”: Homicide, Nativism, and Working-Class Culture in Antebellum New York City’, The Journal of American History, 74 (1987), 393. Dayton, Last Days of Knickerbocker Life, 221, 217–18. 13 Ibid., 217.

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Figure 23.1 F. S. Chanfrau in the character of ‘Mose’, a Bowery Boy, 1848. Coloured illustration. TS 939.5.3, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Bowery Boys were trained in, or apprenticed to, a trade, often butchery, and were enthusiastic volunteer fire-fighters.14 Michael Zakim identifies as their sartorial opponent the dandy, who ‘wore coats with small, low collars and exceedingly low stocks’, tightfitting pantaloons, white gloves and French boots. Both dressed for display; but the Bowery Boy was contemptuous of the effete dandy who ‘produced nothing but himself’, and whose dress made ‘it most 14

Ibid., 216–17, 338–9.

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impractical to work’.15 In contrast, the Bowery Boy’s costume represented a tough, self-sufficient, productive and participatory masculinity which, despite his renown for drinking and fighting, bestowed on him a degree of respectability. Although an 1857 clash with a rival gang left twelve people dead, this mid-century Bowery Boy was twenty years later a romantic legend.16 ‘He liked to fight’, wrote Colonel Lynx in The National Police Gazette in 1879, but he was ‘square and honest . . . not a drunkard or a bum’. His dress was ‘subdued and yet rakish’, whereas ‘The young men of the present Bowery’ were ‘utterly devoid of any striking characteristics’.17 Across the Atlantic, English cities were grappling with a succession of sartorially distinctive and style-conscious violent male youth gangs. The scuttlers appeared in working-class areas of Manchester and Salford, in the northwest.18 Their dress comprised a ‘union shirt, bell-bottomed trousers, the heavy leather belt, pricked out in fancy designs with the large steel buckle and the thick, iron-shod clogs’.19 Some also had the flaps of their coat pockets ‘cut into little peaks’, wore ‘“flashy” silk scarves’ and, like the Bowery Boy, a distinctive hairstyle, ‘short at the back and sides’ with ‘long fringes . . . plastered down on the forehead’ (Figure 23.2) and topped with ‘“Pigeon-board” peaked caps’.20 Many elements of scuttler style were common to gangs in other cities, including Birmingham’s ‘peaky blinders’ and the London Hooligans. All wore bell-bottomed trousers, heavy clogs or boots, a leather belt with metal buckle, a scarf or muffler, often brightly coloured, and cropped hair with a long fringe beneath a cap.21

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16 17

18 19

20 21

Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 193–4. Anbinder, Five Points, 280–90. Colonel Lynx, ‘City Characters: The Bowery Boy. Is There, in These Degenerate Days, Such an Individual?’, The National Police Gazette, 2 August 1879. Davies, Gangs of Manchester, 18. Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 155. Davies, Gangs of Manchester, 22. Chinn, Peaky Blinders, 67–8, 70–1; Birmingham Daily Mail, 14 May 1904, 2; Pearson, Hooligan, 93–4.

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Figure 23.2 ‘William Brooks’, a Salford scuttler, c. 1894. Police identification record. Courtesy of Greater Manchester Police Museum & Archives.

Hooligans were sometimes called ‘London Larrikins’, a reference to their Australian counterparts.22 Appearing in Melbourne and Sydney from the 1860s, larrikins worked in largely unskilled occupations but ‘affected a flamboyantly streetwise style of dress’ again featuring bellbottomed trousers and heavy belts. These were worn with ‘a flatcrowned, wide-brimmed felt hat, with a cord and tassels descending from the side . . . coats with velvet collars, and mysterious pieces of scalloped velvet on the tail . . . high-heeled shoes and fancy neckties’ and ‘striking’ haircuts with ‘[g]reasy forelocks’ or ‘waxed quiffs’.23 Like the Bowery Boys, British gangs were frequently named after the streets where they loitered and which they viewed as ‘in some way their personal property’.24 The ubiquitous brass- or steel-buckled

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Pearson, Hooligan, 98–100. Melissa Bellanta and Simon Sleight, ‘The Leary Larrikin’, Cultural and Social History, 11 (2014), 263–9; Pearson, Hooligan, 98–100. See also Margaret Maynard, Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 92–3. Roberts, Classic Slum, 156; Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth 1889–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 188; Chinn, Peaky Blinders, 17–18.

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belt was used as a weapon in ‘vicious and purposeless’ battles between gangs, rooted ‘in a subconscious wish to establish “territory”’.25 While men deemed overly-concerned with their appearance have often been denounced as effeminate, gang members’ use of distinctive dress ‘to signify “hardness”’ underscored the prevailing heteronormativity.26 ‘Superb hardness’ was what Vorticist Wyndham Lewis most admired about the apaches of Belle Époque Paris.27 Determined to look stylish, but not bourgeois, these gangs of violent, anarchic, young men adopted a variant of urban labourers’ dress even as they disdained those who worked.28 They were sensationalized in the press, a 1907 cover of Le Petit Journal, for example, announcing ‘L’Apache est la plaie de Paris’ (The Apache is the plague of Paris). A stylized image shows a knife-wielding man in a short jacket, striped sailor shirt, tapered trousers, red cummerbund, white scarf, boots and cap.29 Michelle Perrot confirms these were essentially the elements of apache dress but, significantly, she says the trousers were bell-bottomed (pantalon à pattes d’éléphant/pantalon evasé).30 In a 1900s postcard image, the flared trousers of three silhouetted apaches contrast with the tapered trousers of their intended victim (Figure 23.3), and photographs of apaches show them in loose straight or flared trousers.31

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28 29 30 31

Roberts, Classic Slum, 156. In 1939 a journalist observed that if the belt was used as a weapon, braces must also have been worn to hold up the trousers, but they are absent from descriptions of gang dress. Birmingham Mail, 15 April 1939, 7. Jonathan Faiers, ‘White Lies and the Tailoring of Evil’, in Joanne Turney (ed.), Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance (London and New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), 13–14; Brent Shannon, The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 30–1, 158–9; Andrew Davies, ‘Youth Gangs, Masculinity and Violence in Late Victorian Manchester and Salford’, Journal of Social History, 32 (1998), 353. Wyndham Lewis (ed.), Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, no. 1 (London: John Lane, 20 June 1914), 27. Perrot, ‘Dans le Paris’, 73. Le Petit Journal, Supplement Illustré, 20 October 1907. Perrot, ‘Dans le Paris’, 73. Nicolas Chaudun and Yves Billon, Zone, zonards, Apaches: le people des bordures de Paris (Paris: Zaradoc, Zombi Films, 2014).

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Figure 23.3 ‘Tête en fer et Coineux, sortez votre couteau! Nous allons, en cinq sec, descendre un Proprio!’, 1902–10. Photomechanical print postcard, 9 × 14 cm. Ville de Paris / Bibliothèque historique, CPA-0222-(003).

The global occurrence and longevity of the bell-bottomed trousers, sometimes simply straight rather than flared from the knee and sometimes decorated with lines of pearl or brass buttons, demands explanation.32 Many British gangs found inspiration in the dress of London costermongers who had a reputation for hardness and a distinctive dress code which, according to midnineteenth-century journalist Henry Mayhew, included ‘trowsers . . . made to fit tightly at the knee and swell gradually until they reach the boot’.33 But this begs the question of where the coster’s style originated, because although by the dawn of the nineteenth century trousers had mostly replaced breeches among men of all classes, at no time in that century were standard men’s trousers bell-bottomed.34 Indeed, the anti-bourgeois character of 32 33

34

Chinn, Peaky Blinders, 69–70. Davies, City of Gangs, 16; Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York: Dover and London: Constable, 1968), vol. i, 51. Beverly Lemire, ‘A Question of Trousers: Seafarers, Masculinity and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress, c. 1600–1800’, Cultural and Social History, 13/1 (2016), 8.

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street style is reinforced by the fashion among elite men in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1890s for ‘trousers – cut very full at the top and tapering sharply at the ankle’.35 Trousers were originally worn by seafarers and other working men. As Beverly Lemire demonstrates, with the expansion of European empires, deep-sea, long-distance mariners gained in prestige and ‘offered alternate models of masculinity, reorienting male fashion’. Sailors’ clothes, known as slops, were ready-made, cheap, hardwearing, ‘simple and unfitted to facilitate easy adaptation and alteration’ and had a generally uniform appearance, though many sailors embellished their clothes with ribbons along the trouser seams or distinctive jacket buttons. Slops were sold in British ports, shipped around the world to colonial territories, and bought by sailors, other working men, and institutions.36 Mariners sold or pawned their seafaring clothes onshore, as did the prostitutes who serviced and stole from them, making slops available still more cheaply second-hand.37 Trousers were worn by officers as well as ordinary seamen, but the latter accounted for the vast majority of mariners and, as contemporary illustrations show, the trousers they wore were loose with either a columnar or bell-bottomed silhouette (Figure 23.4).38 This combination of uniformity, cheapness, availability, and association with a model of adventurous, fearless, hard-living, labouring, homosocial masculinity explains the prevalence of bell-bottomed trousers among gangs of male youths across Europe, America, and Australia. Other elements of their

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Shannon, Cut of His Coat, 7. Lemire, ‘A Question of Trousers’, 2–6; Miles Lambert, ‘Check Shirts, Flannel Jackets, Canvas Trousers: The Trade in Slops from Eighteenth-Century Liverpool’, Textile History, 52/1–2 (2021), 80; Maynard, Fashioned from Penury, 65–6, 71–3; Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 122–31. 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), 300; Melanie Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-Class Credit (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), 3. Lemire, ‘A Question of Trousers’, 11–12.

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Figure 23.4 ‘At Sea’. Print of a sailor on board ship during a storm, wearing bell-bottomed trousers, heavy buckled belt, and neck scarf, c. 1832–9. Such prints were sold to be coloured at home. Ink-on-paper print, 21 × 16.5 cm. © Museum of London, 99.132/60b.

appearance, including silk scarves and, frequently, tattoos also referenced sailor style.39 Like their late twentieth-century counterparts, nineteenthcentury youths also signalled gang membership through a particular way of walking, posture, and vocabulary.40 The Bowery Boy moved with a ‘rolling swaggering gait’ and was 39

40

Davies, Gangs of Manchester, 23; Bellanta and Sleight, ‘The Leary Larrikin’, 273; Perrot, ‘Dans le Paris’, 74; Lambert, ‘Check Shirts’, 91. Mike Brake, Comparative Youth Culture: The Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth Subcultures in America, Britain and Canada (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 1–12.

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known by his ‘position, at rest, reclining against a lamp or awning post’, the angle of his cigar, ‘tone of voice’ and ‘unwritten slang’. Hats and caps were worn at an angle ‘to impart a rakish air’, offset a hairstyle, or obscure the face.41 The larrikin exhibited ‘showy insolence’, The Australasian Sketcher noting his ‘devil-may-care expression’, the Ballarat Star his ‘brazen assurance’.42 Manchester scuttlers on trial for grievous bodily harm were ‘most flippant’ and ‘laughed and turned round to wink at friends in the gallery’.43 Not only the distinctive dress, but also how it was worn and body language were intrinsic parts of the display. A confident walk and relaxed posture in public spaces asserted ownership and could be menacing. So too could the use of exclusive argots which allowed conversations to be openly conducted in public, unintelligible to all but gang members. Facetious behaviour in court demonstrated lack of respect for authority and made a claim for agency. Ultimately the gang members could do little more than disrupt proceedings while those in authority could impose punishment. An 1889 newspaper report on the revival of ‘Outrages by “Scuttlers”’ in Salford attributed the preceding decline in activity ‘to the exemplary punishment meted out to scuttlers at the assizes and sessions’.44 But in societies still adjusting to the social dislocations of rapid urbanization and striving to impose industrial discipline, public flouting of authority could be especially unsettling. Equally, displays of bravado could elevate the performer in the eyes of other gang members and underscore allegiance to them as could the receipt of harsh sentences. Collectively, distinctive dress, an angled hat, easy confidence of posture, and a bold stare spoke powerfully of rebellion (Figure 23.2).

Young Women In their corrective study of ‘flash’ women in the eastern Australian colonies Melissa Bellanta and Alana Piper note that histories of 41

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Dayton, Last Days of Knickerbocker Life, 217–18; Davies, Gangs of Manchester, 22; Chinn, Peaky Blinders, 67, 70–1; Pearson, Hooligan, 94. Bellanta and Sleight, ‘The Leary Larrikin’, 263; The Australasian Sketcher with Pen and Pencil, 15 April 1873, 7; Melbourne Punch, 26 January 1871, 25. Davies, Gangs of Manchester, 20. 44 Manchester Times, 22 June 1889, 3.

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street style in their 1870–1910 period typically focus on men. ‘Flash’ indicated ‘gaudily dressed women of questionable morals’ and critics similarly described the dress of young women associated with street gangs as tastelessly showy.45 They also assumed them to be criminal, inappropriately sexual, devoid of independent thought, and mere accessories – indeed, the property – of male gang members. The Bowery Boy’s ‘Gal’, for example, wore: a cheap but always greatly exaggerated copy of the prevailing Broadway mode; her skirt was shorter and fuller; her bodice longer and lower; her hat more flaring and more gaudily trimmed; her handkerchief more ample and more flauntingly carried; her corkscrew curls thinner, longer, and stiffer, but her gait and swing were studied imitations of her lord and master.46

The focus on extremes – ‘shorter’, ‘fuller’, ‘thinner’, ‘longer’, ‘lower’ – and imitation of the male were repeated elsewhere. A description of Birmingham ‘peaky moll’ dress was slightly more detailed noting ‘a lavish display of pearl buttons, a fringe obscuring the whole of her forehead which descended nearly to her eyes, a gaudy coloured silk neckerchief . . . [and] a wide elaborate hat decorated with feathers and poppies’. But still the author’s focus was excess and her mirroring of ‘the peaky himself’.47 Situating these young women as mere ciphers of male gang members is to deny female independence and agency. The patriarchal order notwithstanding, working-class women did not simply view themselves in relation to men or existing to do as men commanded. Robert Roberts recalled, for example, his eldest sister who was in many respects a model daughter but possessed of a strong sense of self-worth and intolerant of injustice. Transferring from the cotton mill to better-paid work in engineering during the First World War, she began using cosmetics, a practice condemned by older generations. When her father, certain it would lead to ‘sexual looseness, moral decay’, threw her 45

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Melissa Bellanta and Alana Piper, ‘Looking Flash: Disreputable Women’s Dress and “Modernity”, 1870–1910’, History Workshop Journal, 78 (2014), 58–9. Dayton, Last Days of Knickerbocker Life, 218–19. Chinn, Peaky Blinders, 77.

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powders and creams on the fire his daughter gave him an ultimatum: allow her to continue their use or throw her out. The latter risked not only family breakdown and social stigma, but also economic loss since the household would no longer benefit from her earnings.48 Female gang members were also frequently situated as ‘molls’ to be fought over.49 While a connection between young people’s dress and sexuality is unsurprising, young women were not simply appendages to male youth gangs but active members, participating in violence and sometimes forming their own gangs. In 1908, for example, the cover of the sensationalist weekly L’Œil de la Police featured five female ‘Apaches en Jupons’. The women, subsequently identified as prostitutes, are shown – in notably unostentatious dress – beating a man and pulling off his clothes, probably intending to sell them (Figure 23.5).50 Patriarchal culture judged female gang members, and their dress, much more harshly than their male counterparts. Melbourne Punch considered that ‘[b]oys will be boys’, and the ‘sower of wild oats generally becomes a useful member of society’, but the girl ‘[o]nce steeped in vice . . . is generally lost beyond redemption’.51 A group of young people in an 1870s Melbourne drinking den all bore ‘the stamp of depravity and crime’ but the girls were ‘by far the worst spectacle . . . Bedizened out with tawdry finery, their language . . . the most disgusting’ and ‘their gestures the most shameless’.52 This was not just the rhetoric of sensationalist journalism; female sexual misconduct, actual or perceived, could mean incarceration for a period of years in a range of institutions including residential schools, lock hospitals and Magdalene asylums. Their aim was not only punishment, but also moral reform and detainees might be set to laundry work to imbue them with spiritual and physical cleanliness. They could also be made to wear unflattering uniforms with their hair cut short in the 48

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Robert Roberts, A Ragged Schooling (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), ch. 4, ‘Janie’; Roberts, Classic Slum, 205. Melbourne Punch, 20 June 1872, 199; Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900–1914 (London: Phoenix, 2012), 372. L’Œil de la Police, 6 (1908), front cover. Melbourne Punch, 20 June 1872, 199. 52 The Age, 29 March 1870, 3.

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Figure 23.5 ‘Apaches en Jupons’, front cover of L’Œil de la Police, no. 6, 1908. Printed serial. Bibliothèque nationale de France, ark:/12148/ bpt6k955553t.

belief that showy dress bespoke sexual impropriety and that the latter often financed the former.53 Non-elite young women risked paying a very high price indeed for their sartorial pleasures and bold behaviour. 53

Linda Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family in Britain, 1800–1945 (London: Routledge, 1995), 8, 60, 80–4, 94–100; Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ch. 3.

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Acquisition Information about street style was mainly produced by people concerned with visual spectacle or perceived immorality. How the clothing was acquired remains largely a matter of ‘informed speculation’. Crucially, street style was an urban phenomenon and large towns and cities offered an abundance of acquisition opportunities, both lawful and illegal. In Britain and America, the mass manufacture of cheap ready-made menswear expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century producing not only slops but also betterquality garments in a wider range of styles. Garments made by London manufacturers were sold throughout Britain and exported in bulk to its colonies, including Australia, Canada, and South Africa, the value of English clothing exports rising from £1 million to £7.6 million between 1830 and 1870.54 In the early decades of the century these garments were sold at auction to wholesalers and retailers, but manufacturers’ relatives later emigrated to open shops. Adam Mendelsohn cites the example of Moses Benjamin who in 1843 opened a Melbourne store with a stock of 2,000 pairs of trousers and 8,400 shirts he had taken with him from England to Australia.55 But despite aggressive sales techniques which promised bargains, a complete outfit of new ready-made clothes was beyond the means of most non-elite youths. They could turn to the used-clothing market, supplied in British colonies and America by exports from London.56 Secondhand clothing was not necessarily considered second-best. Manuel Charpy notes that in Paris, until 1870, used clothing was sold, undifferentiated, alongside new garments and purchased by a socially diverse clientele who ‘did not associate this trade with poverty or obsolete goods’.57 And while the second-hand market 54

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Adam D. Mendelsohn, The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 114; Sarah Levitt, ‘Cheap Mass-Produced Men’s Clothing in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Textile History, 22/2 (1991), 13. Mendelsohn, Rag Race, 120–1. 56 Ibid., 125–6. Manuel Charpy, ‘The Scope and Structure of the Nineteenth-Century SecondHand Trade in the Parisian Clothes Market’, in Laurence Fontaine (ed.), Alternative Exchanges: Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 141–2. See also Lemire, Global Trade, 120–1.

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was in relative decline in many cities by the end of the nineteenth century, its disappearance was uneven and demand for used clothing continued.58 Bellanta and Piper emphasize the ‘hotchpotch’ acquisition of Australian female ‘flash’ style, combining, for example, new and second-hand garments, ready-made and hand sewn.59 Larrikins combined purchase-by-instalment of new ready-made garments, clothes made by female relatives, self-modification, purchase of second-hand clothing, and theft. Small items, such as scarves and neck ties were particularly easy to steal, but these cheaper garments and trimmings were also likely to be among the items purchased new for ready money.60 Probably most street style was similarly acquired. Female scuttlers were often factory workers, known to be among the highest-paid female labourers.61 But the author of an 1870 article about Manchester’s old clothes’ market picked out ‘a factory girl [who] has come to buy a dress . . . She says that it is rather too long-waisted, and “it’ll want takkin’ in a bit; but wi’ very little alteration it’ll do very weel”’.62 This one garment demonstrates the ‘hotchpotch’ approach combining the purchase of a second-hand garment, ready-made at point of sale, but in need of alteration to ensure a good fit, whether by the purchaser or someone else. Hiring and shared purchase were also possibilities. From the 1880s to the First World War, a fashion for exotic hat feathers raged (among women of all classes) on both sides of the Atlantic, but feathers were expensive.63 In 1885 a feather worker was charged with the theft of two ostrich feathers each worth seven shillings – two shillings more than her weekly earnings of five 58

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Charpy, ‘The Scope and Structure’, 146; Margot Riley, ‘Cast-Offs: Civilization, Charity or Commerce? Aspects of Second Hand Clothing Use in Australia, 1788–1900’, in Alexandra Palmer and Hazel Clark (eds.), Old Clothes, New Looks: Second Hand Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 62–5. Bellanta and Piper, ‘Looking Flash’, 59. Bellanta and Sleight, ‘The Leary Larrikin’, 264, 270–2. Andrew Davies, ‘“These Viragoes Are No Less Cruel Than the Lads”: Young Women, Gangs and Violence in Late Victorian Manchester and Salford’, The British Journal of Criminology, 39 (1999), 78. Graphic, 55 (17 December 1870), 584, 586–7. Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008).

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shillings.64 According to Clara Collett, reporting on women’s work in Charles Booth’s 1889 Labour and Life of the People, East London girls employed in making matches bought ‘their clothes and feathers (especially the latter) by forming clubs; seven or eight of them will join together paying a shilling a week each, and drawing lots to decide who shall have the money each week’.65 Police magistrate Montagu Williams also emphasized the importance of hats among ‘East End girls’, the ‘size and colour’ of their feathers being points of ‘keen rivalry’. From one case that came before him he learned that ‘these head ornaments are, in many instances, let out on hire, at so much per week or month’.66 Diverse modes of acquisition meant the dress of individual gang members could differ considerably while still identifying them as a member of that group. The peaky blinder, for example, varied from ‘well-dressed respectability, in velvet jacket, brightly coloured scarf, huge metal ring, and the crowning cigarette, to the less favoured corduroys – a ragged, unkempt, untidy and uncouth array of togs, pinned or even nailed together’.67 It was sufficient for a hooligan, larrikin, or apache to be recognizable as such to the general public, but it was important that other gangs could identify his specific affiliation. This could be achieved through the smaller and more easily obtained articles of clothing. A band of apaches, for example, was known as ‘les Cravates vertes’ (the green neckties), while the Manchester Napoo gang were recognizable by their pink neckerchiefs.68 Tattoos were another option; members of a Melbourne gang each bore a tattoo of an arrow-pierced heart signalling their membership. While it is uncertain whether the dots tattooed on the hand of larrikin convict John Kenworthy indicated a specific allegiance, it is perhaps not coincidental that the notes accompanying the police mugshot of Mancunian 64

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Tessa Boase, Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds (London: Aurum Press, 2021), 2–3. Charles Booth (ed.), Labour and Life of the People, Volume 1: East London (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1889), 437. Montagu Williams, Round London: Down East and Up West (London: Macmillan, 1892), 4. Chinn, Peaky Blinders, 72. Bellanta makes the same point about larrikins. Larrikins, 109. Perrot, ‘Dans le Paris’, 72; Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels?, 191.

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William Brooks, leader of the Greengate scuttlers, record as his distinguishing marks ‘4 Dots left arm[?]’ (Figure 23.2).69 Simple tattoos might be self-applied or done by friends at little or no cost and, like argot, their iconography was a form of language.70 This permanent body marking therefore served not only to indicate the wearer’s membership of and commitment to the gang, but also to exclude those who did not know what it meant.

Popular Culture There was a strong link between street style and dance. The Bowery Boy was ‘seen, felt, and understood’, on the ballroom floor, the apaches had ‘a passion for dancing’, and the larrikin a dance style ‘peculiarly his own’, the sound of his ‘high-heeled boots’ producing ‘a show of noisy virtuosity’.71 But the relationship between street style and popular culture was symbiotic. Bowery Boys were keen theatre-goers, but equally, their style was immortalized in the character Mose, and his Gal Lize, in the popular 1848 play Glance at New York.72 London music hall acts, whose material featured costermongers, were exported to the colonies.73 Through the theatrical ephemera of playbills, posters, and prints, stage costumes were circulated beyond the immediate audience (Figure 23.1). For the larrikiness, ‘[b]urlesque performances acted as case-studies in brazen femininity’ and in Paris the apache idol, singer, and prostitute Amélie Hélie/Casque d’Or, was photographed by the celebrity Pirou studios in ‘a pearl-grey costume and ostrich-feather hat’ for cartes de visite which circulated as cheap celebrity 69

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Bellanta and Sleight, ‘The Leary Larrikin’, 273; Davies, Gangs of Manchester, plates between 256 and 257. Bellanta and Piper, ‘Looking Flash’, 16. Dayton, Last Days of Knickerbocker Life, 219; Lisa Tickner, ‘The Popular Culture of Kermesse: Lewis, Painting and Performance, 1912–13’, in Terry Smith (ed.), In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997), 147; Bellanta and Piper, ‘The Leary Larrikin’, 274. Walter J. Meserve, On Stage, America! A Selection of Distinctly American Plays (New York: Feedback Theatrebooks and Prospero Press, 1996), 162. Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 122–3; Bellanta and Sleight, ‘The Leary Larrikin’, 276.

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souvenirs.74 In England, Robert Roberts remembered the windows of Edwardian newsagents ‘festooned’ with postcards of famous actresses which ‘fixed the child’s conception of womanly beauty’.75 Through the sending and receipt of such postcards idealized notions of fashion and beauty were transmitted. But after the First World War these ideas began to change. With young women in the vanguard, female dress style gradually transformed: hemlines rose from ankle to knee, extensive stiffened corsetry was abandoned, and trousers adopted.76 The lodestar was cinema.

urban cool: cinema and race Robert Roberts, who grew up in working-class Salford in the early twentieth century, recalled vividly the impact of cinema which ‘burst like a vision into the underman’s existence and, rapidly displacing both concert and theatre, became both his chief source of enjoyment and one of the greatest factors in his cultural development’.77 Film’s rapid spread across the world in the first decade of the 1900s raised concern about its influence on the young.78 In 1917, the British National Council of Public Morals focused on American films which comprised 90 per cent of those shown in British cinemas, then numbering some 4,500 and attended weekly by roughly half the population. One issue was the wearing of ‘light attire’ by ‘young men and young women’ in scenes set in ‘wateringplaces’; but the managing director of the Trans-Atlantic Film Company argued that there was no ‘idea of indecency’ and that it reflected common practice in America’s warmer climes where ‘there were more of the continental ideas . . . than in England’.79

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Bellanta, Larrikins, 52; Blom, Vertigo Years, 72–3; Tickner, ‘The Popular Culture’, 147. Roberts, Classic Slum, 168–9. 76 Breward, Culture of Fashion, 184–9. Roberts, Classic Slum, 175. 78 Blom, Vertigo Years, 311. The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities. Being the Report of and Chief Evidence Taken by the Cinema Commission of Inquiry Instituted by the National Council of Public Morals (London: Williams and Norgate, 1917), 2–3, lxvii, 185, 15, 65–6.

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But English ideas were changing. After the First World War, said Roberts: nowhere did young emancipation flash itself more openly than in dress. Evening found teenage girls massed round the new-laid dance floors in their knee-length skirts, silk stockings and vee-necked blouses . . . Creamed, perfumed and powdered like the ‘immoral’ actress of 1910, the post-war daughter of the common labourer certainly gloried in the new permissiveness . . . Clothes grew lighter in colour and weight. The young men in their everwidening ‘bags’ and double-breasted jackets, slicked and fresh, a different race from their fathers, ‘jazzed’ with the shameless females in those dance halls.80

J. B. Priestley too found the ‘new post-war England’ changed, a land of ‘giant cinemas and dance halls . . . factory girls looking like actresses’. It belonged, ‘far more to the age itself than this particular island. America . . . was its real birthplace.’81 Also writing in the 1930s, George Orwell noted the increase in ‘consumption of all cheap luxuries’, in his largely bleak account of England’s depressed industrial northwest. This he attributed to ‘the movies and the mass production of cheap smart clothes since the war’, enabling teenagers in dead-end jobs to buy on credit new Hollywoodinspired outfits and ‘stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of [themselves] as Clark Gable or Greta Garbo’.82 This glamorous, sophisticated ideal was a far remove from the robust practicality of nineteenth-century street-corner style, but it came at a heavy price. Studies in London and Chicago found cinema to be ‘a near-obsession with working-class youths’ in the 1910s and 1920s. While girls preferred films with ‘domestic and 80 81

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Roberts, Classic Slum, 222–4. J. B. Priestley, English Journey: Being a Rambling But Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought during a Journey through England during the Autumn of the Year 1933 (London: William Heinemann in association with Victor Gollancz, n.d.), 401. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier [1937] (Ebook: Sanage, n.d.), 73. For mass production and the introduction of synthetic fibres, see Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 71–80.

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fairy stories’, boys favoured ‘wild west’ films followed by ‘thrillers and action films involving . . . some kind of “rough stuff”’. Favourite film stars were cowboy heroes Tom Mix and William S. Hart who, Andrew Diamond argues, offered working-class youths a model of masculinity based on ‘physical strength and aggressiveness’ in colonial settings. Furthermore, B-Westerns’ stock characters of ‘Indians, Mexicans, and swarthy-complexioned bandits’ introduced ‘a new trend of hard racial stereotyping’.83 In fact, the films were building on existing prejudices. In 1875, Scribner’s Monthly bemoaned ‘a distinctive San Francisco product’, the Hoodlum, ‘a ruffian in embryo’ but always, according to Herbert Asbury, ‘attired in raiment of fashionable cut’.84 In the late 1880s: he swaggered about with his hair oiled, puffed, curled at the sides, and parted in the middle; and clad in a velvet vest, a black or olive frock coat with a peaked sleeve which rose to his ear, knee-high boots of calfskin, a sombrero, a ruffled white shirt with a low collar, a black string tie, and tight fawn-colored trousers.85

He was ‘the sworn enemy of the Chinamen’, the stoning of whom he considered ‘a work of righteousness’.86 Larrikins were also renowned for violence against the Chinese population, which Bellanta attributes to economic competition.87 Similarly, a vicious 1882 newspaper report painted the Hoodlum as ‘a victim’ of the ‘Mongolian curse’ or ‘cancer’ affecting San Francisco where ‘the white toiler . . . competes in vain’ against some 40,000 ‘wifeless, childless, Christless Chinese labourers’.88 But labour surplus was only an exacerbating factor; entitlement to white privilege was 83

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The Cinema, 275; Andrew J. Diamond, Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908–1969 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 34–5. Scribner’s Monthly, An Illustrated Magazine for the People, July 1875, 276; Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of San Francisco (London: Arrow Books, 2004), 159. Asbury, Gangs of San Francisco, 159. B. E. Lloyd, Lights and Shades in San Francisco (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Company, 1876), 298; Scribner’s Monthly, 276. Melissa Bellanta, ‘Leary Kin: Australian Larrikins and the Blackface Minstrel Dandy’, Journal of Social History, 42 (2009), 688. Northwest Enterprise, 17 June 1882, 1.

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hardwired into the colonialist psyche and political assumptions. And while larrikins were portrayed on stage in blackface minstrel shows of which they were ‘avid consumers’, adopting, in turn, ‘aspects of minstrel-dandy style as part of their collective identity’, this did not indicate empathy with people of colour.89 Indeed, as Shirley Anne Tate shows, blackface minstrelsy reduced racial identity ‘to a commodity to be sold, bought and consumed’, the appropriation of Black culture for the ‘continuation of . . . white material, cultural, aesthetic, psychic and epistemic privilege’.90 Although reinforced by cinema, the racial stereotyping that named the Parisian apaches began long before its invention. The gangs reportedly adopted the name in 1900 after a newspaper quoted a police inspector who described a particularly bloody Paris murder as ‘un véritable truc d’Apaches’ (a real Apache thing). The French were well acquainted with both the purported savagery of Native Americans and their disappearance in the face of European slaughter. Many would have read James Fenimore Cooper’s enduringly successful novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826), which the newspaper cited in its report.91 Others would have attended the Wild West shows of William F. Cody, aka Buffalo Bill, which toured Europe between 1889 and 1906, the same year that French cinema, which dominated the repertoire before the First World War, released the first of a series of silent Westerns.92 A poster for Les Apaches du Far-West (1907) shows the murderous cowboys bearing down on the Apaches (Figure 23.6). Meanwhile, in America itself, the ‘Great Migration’ was in progress, relocating the African American population from the rural South to cities in the North and West between the 1890s and 1940s. 89 90

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Bellanta, ‘Leary Kin’, 681, 688, 690. Shirley Anne Tate, Decolonising Sambo: Transculturation, Fungibility and Black and People of Colour Futurity (Bingley: Emerald, 2019), 153, 145–7. L’intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux, no. 1034, 20 March 1904, columns 436–7. Humphries notes the similar appropriation of Native American names by British gangs, such as the Anderston Redskins of Glasgow. Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels?, 189. Robert E. Bonner, ‘“Not an Imaginary Picture Altogether, But Parts”: The Artistic Legacy of Buffalo Bill Cody’, The Magazine of Western History, 61/1 (2011), 40; Blom, Vertigo Years, 310; Tim Scheie, ‘Genre in Transitional Cinema: “Arizona Bill” and the Silent French Western, 1912–1914’, French Forum, 36/2–3 (2011), 201–19.

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Figure 23.6 ‘Les Apaches du Far-West’, 1907. Illustrated poster, 115 × 158 cm. Ville de Paris / Bibliothèque historique, 1-AFF-000875.

Industrial relocation from the Northeast to the Midwest and South and the growth of new industries in the West created a new relationship between East and West where racial tensions mirrored those existing, and now intensified, between North and South. These were underpinned by the enactment of segregating federal Jim Crow laws which fostered the growth in size and power of the white enforcement groups like the Ku Klux Klan and an increase in racial violence, including the lynching of Black people in the South. As in the 1880s, the tensions were exacerbated by competition for employment following First World War demobilization, economic depression in the 1930s, and immigration from abroad including the Philippines, an American colony from 1898–1946.93 Young Filipino men flocked to California, numbering over 30,000 by 1930, acculturated by the ‘Americanization’ of the Philippines, 93

James Smethurst, The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 1–26, 96–7, 188–90.

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where they learned to speak English, read American books, and watched inspirational Hollywood films. A contemporary sociologist cited these Manila screenings as a powerful stimulus to migration.94 In California, taxi dance halls, where men of colour paid to dance with professional white female dancers, were the favoured leisure places of the Filipino migrants. To attend they dressed impeccably and distinctively in expensive double-breasted suits ‘with padded shoulders and wide lapels’ like those they had seen on the silver screen. These were known as McIntosh [sic] suits because they were made by the San Francisco tailors Richard MacIntosh Studio Clothes which supplied the on-screen clothes for Hollywood stars. MacIntosh salesmen visited the living and leisure places of the Filipino men to take measurements and orders for suits.95 Alternatively suits were bought from local, often Filipino tailors, the essential point being that they were bespoke (Figure 23.7).96 Possession of a tailor-made suit demonstrated achievement, separating established migrants from the new arrivals in traditional Filipino dress.97 But America, in reality, was very different from the imagined ‘land of romance and achievement’.98 Through much of the 1930s Filipino labourers in California were attacked by groups of white men, and in the Watsonville riots of January 1930 one was killed. ‘Racial hatred’, reported the Evening Star, had been ‘inflamed by the employment of white dancing girls in a Filipino club’, and Filipino workers ‘ha[d] deprived white men of jobs in the fields’.99 The Filipinos were also said to be ‘dazzling spenders’, presenting the dancing girls with ‘valuable gifts’, making them attractive dance partners.100 The white men’s resentment at the loss of 94

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España-Maram, Creating Masculinity, 106; Los Angeles Times, 6 December 1929, 4; Denise Khor, ‘“Filipinos Are the Dandies of the Foreign Colonies”: Race, Labor Struggles, and the Transpacific Routes of Hollywood and Philippine Films, 1924–1948’, Pacific Historical Review, 81 (2012), 375. Roces, ‘“These Guys”’, 538–9; España-Maram, Creating Masculinity, 111. Khor, ‘“Filipinos Are the Dandies”’, 381. España-Maram, Creating Masculinity, 111–12. Los Angeles Times, 6 December 1929, 4. Evening Star, 24 January 1930, A-7. Los Angeles Times, 13 April 1929; 2 February 1930.

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Figure 23.7 ‘Coast Race Riots Re-echo through State and Nation’. Photograph from the Los Angeles Times showing California Filipino tailor shop and dance hall, 2 February 1930. Los Angeles Times Staff © 1930.

what they regarded as ‘their’ jobs and women was intensified by the poverty of their own situation. Life for many working-class American families was characterized by scarcity and limited opportunities.101 Few young men in such families could afford the dress and recreation of the Filipinos who, without immediate ties to parents and siblings, had money to spend as they wished.102 For the Filipinos, spending money was some compensation for much hardship. They had no citizenship rights in the United States, lived in segregated housing, and performed long hours of arduous labour. To keep at bay the ubiquitous peat dust, agricultural workers had to wrap their entire bodies in layers of 101

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Susan Porter Benson, ‘“What Goes ’Round Comes ’Round”: Second-Hand Clothing, Furniture and Tools in Working-Class Lives in the Interwar USA’, in Fontaine (ed.), Alternative Exchanges, 153. Roces, ‘“These Guys”’, 545.

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clothing.103 To remove the sweat and dirt, to change the grimy work clothes for the smart suit, to go into town with friends, dance and spend freely was to assert self-worth and equality, to escape, briefly, to the fantasy world which had lured them to America, to display racial unity in a hostile land, and to embrace a degree of agency. While the ‘uniforms’ of nineteenth-century street gangs were everyday wear, the Filipinos’ formal suits were discrete leisure wear. Keeping these valuable clothes safe, spotless, and separate from dirty work clothes in crowded, shared living quarters must have been difficult, and how they managed this is unclear. Labouring families in nineteenth-century England commonly pawned their best clothes when not in use which, as well as providing a temporary income, kept the clothes safe.104 Possibly Filipinos similarly deposited their garments in California’s numerous laundries and cleaners, simultaneously preventing their theft and guaranteeing their pristine condition when needed.105 In a 1933 interview a Filipino bus boy, ‘dressed immaculately in a well-fitting, tailor-made suit’ recounted his arrival in California in 1917. Initially he lived frugally to save money but, after losing his savings gambling, chose to live more enjoyably. Consequently, he had since saved little – ‘I can’t and buy clothes like these’ – but said of the early years that he ‘even washed and ironed [his] own clothes’, implying that he subsequently paid others to do this.106 Money and labour were needed not only to buy but also to maintain the valued garments. Filipinos in America also wore what would come to rank among the most incendiary youth fashions: the zoot suit which appeared towards the end of the 1930s. It became notoriously associated with young Mexican American men, pachuchos, in California, but it was first associated with the Black urban youth of Harlem 103

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Marissa Aroy, Little Manila: Filipinos in California’s Heartland (KVIE, 2007), www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNCZ8sGJs8I&list=WL&index=8 (accessed 8 June 2020). Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet, 6–8. Los Angeles Daily Times, 1 January 1921, 24. Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, 1 January 1933, 11. The commentary on Aroy, Little Manila states that in Stockton, California, laundries were among the businesses owned by Filipinos.

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in the Northeast and inextricably linked with jazz.107 From the 1910s to the 1930s the Harlem Renaissance witnessed an ‘unprecedented flowering’ of Black artistic culture.108 It encompassed visual and literary arts as well as jazz music, but the phonograph and touring performers spread the latter more quickly, taking it to California where Hollywood aided the wider circulation of jazz music, dance, and culture.109 The zoot suit was, like the McIntosh, formally tailored, but oversized, with a long jacket, exaggerated shoulders, and trousers cut wide and loose from waist to knee then tapered to the ankle, an inversion of the nineteenth-century bell-bottoms and designed to enable performance of the fast, acrobatic movements of jazz dance, most notably the jitterbug.110 While adhering to this basic format, the different cultural contexts of Harlem and California produced differences in East and West Coast zoot-suit style. East Coast zoot suits were often brightly coloured and worn with ‘thin-soled and knob-toed dancing shoes’. In California, the shoes were ‘double- or triple-soled Stacy Adams’, the suits white or dark-coloured and worn with a widebrimmed hat and a long watch or key chain. All were deliberately ostentatious, but still more so in California. According to Newsweek, ‘Hollywood superzooters’ sporting ‘porkpie hats with monstrous brims, spaniel-eared suspenders, string ties, pearl buttons as big as silver dollars, and trouser cuffs so tight they have to be zippered’, ‘made the Harlem boys look like a bunch of undertakers’.111 This flamboyance was exemplified by singer and bandleader Cab Calloway in the 1943 film Stormy Weather (Figure 23.8).112 As with 107

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Douglas Henry Daniels, ‘Los Angeles Zoot: Race “Riot,” the Pachucho, and Black Music Culture’, Journal of Negro History, 82/2 (1997), 201; Peiss, Zoot Suit, 37, 44–50, 113. Rachel Farebrother and Miriam Thaggert, ‘Introduction: Revising a Renaissance’, in Rachel Farebrother and Miriam Thagert (eds.), A History of the Harlem Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 1. Wendy Martin, ‘Jazz and the Harlem Renaissance’, in Farebrother and Thagert (eds.), A History of the Harlem Renaissance, 346–7; Smethurst, African American, 6; Daniels, ‘Los Angeles Zoot’, 202, 206. Daniels, ‘Los Angeles Zoot’, 208, 210. ‘Drape Shape’, Newsweek, 20/10 (7 September 1942), 48. Shane Vogel, ‘Performing “Stormy Weather”: Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, and Katherine Dunham’, South Central Review, 25/1 (2008), 104.

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Figure 23.8 Publicity still of Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather. Cab Calloway wearing a Hollywood ‘superzoot’ suit in the all-Black-cast musical Stormy Weather, 1943. John Kisch Archive via Getty Images.

nineteenth-century street style, the zoot suit was accompanied by a distinctive hairstyle, tattoos, and argot. The Mexican American hairstyle was a ‘“duck-bill” – generous in length and combed toward the center in the back’; African Americans wore a straightened style, ‘the conk’.113 There was no female equivalent of the McIntosh-suited Filipino man as Filipino parents rarely allowed unmarried daughters to leave home.114 But there were female zoot suiters – ‘cholitas’, ‘pachucas’, or ‘pachuquillas’ – some of whom challenged 113

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Alvarez, Power of the Zoot, 86, 89, 90; Richard Griswold del Castillo, ‘The Los Angeles “Zoot Suit Riots” Revisited: Mexican and Latin American Perspectives’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanas, 16 (2000), 369; Daniels, ‘Los Angeles Zoot’, 207. Los Angeles Times, 6 December 1929, 4.

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normative gender binaries by wearing the complete zoot suit. Others replaced the trousers with a short skirt and fishnet stockings or long bobby socks, but all were worn with ‘bravado and swagger’, enhanced with dark lipstick, plucked eyebrows, and hair drawn up into a high pompadour.115 As in the nineteenth century, they were condemned and ridiculed as much for their perceived overly sexualized behaviour as for their clothes and, although they formed their own gangs, were again more often presented by the press as ancillaries to the male zoot suiters.116 In the late 1930s and early 1940s a man’s lower-end standard suit was typically advertised at a cost of $20–$30 – and even half that price on sale – while a good-quality zoot suit cost upwards of $85 (plus accessories).117 But as an exaggeration of mainstream dress rather than a complete departure from it, an approximation of the style could be achieved by wearing oversized standard men’s formal wear, as demonstrated by the three youths photographed in tuxedos taken from a Harlem shop during the 1943 race riots (Figure 23.9). Also, cheaper versions were available for less than $15, retailers offered instalment plans, and many young men – or their female friends and relatives – modified their existing clothes.118 Nevertheless, critics assumed zoot-suit dressing was expensive and associated its wearers with crime.119 Also, 1942 War Production Board restrictions on the amount of cloth used to make a garment prevented the legal production of zoot suits.120 It was not illegal to wear one, but to do so was denounced by white 115

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Daniels, ‘Los Angeles Zoot’, 202; Alvarez, Power of the Zoot, 88; Stuart Cosgrove, ‘The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare’, History Workshop Journal, 18 (1984), 84–5; Elizabeth R. Escobedo, From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 25; Catherine S. Ramírez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 58. Escobedo, From Coveralls, 25; Daniels, ‘Los Angeles Zoot’, 202. See, for example, Evening Star (Washington, DC), 24 March 1939, A-20; Evening Star (Washington, DC), 18 May 1942, B-8; Evening Star (Washington, DC), 6 January 1938, A-22; Peiss, Zoot Suit, 31. Peiss, Zoot Suit, 31. 119 Cosgrove, ‘The Zoot-Suit’, 80. Sarah Elizabeth Howard, ‘Zoot to Boot: The Zoot Suit as Both Costume and Symbol’, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 28 (2010), 114; Peiss, Zoot Suit, 37; Daniels, ‘Los Angeles Zoot’, 208.

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Figure 23.9 Boys wearing looted formal wear. Walker Roberts, aged 12, Henry Campbell, aged 14, and Morris Jackson, aged 13, approximating zoot-suit style in tuxedos taken from a menswear shop during the Harlem race riots, 2 August 1943. Photograph Bettmann via Getty Images

authorities and seen to flout the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. Detractors deemed wearers unpatriotic and accused them of avoiding conscription even though ‘countless’ zoot suiters readily enlisted in the armed forces.121 Cinema, Janus-faced, was complicit. In the same year that Stormy Weather celebrated zoot-suit style, the film industry’s War Activities Committee released The Spirit of ’43. A propaganda film encouraging payment of income taxes to aid the war effort, it starred Donald Duck torn between two alter 121

Alvarez, Power of the Zoot, 107; Cosgrove, ‘The Zoot-Suit’, 83.

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egos: one a zoot-suited ‘Axis-helping spendthrift . . . with a reet pleat, a stuff-cuff, a drape shape’ who tries to entice him into The Idle Hour Club; the other a kilted ‘thrifty Scotch duck, with a heart of gold – and pockets filled with the same’, who urges him to ‘save for taxes’. Donald chooses the latter, punching the former (now with Hitler fringe and moustache) through the swastika-shaped saloon doors of The Idle Hour Club.122 In the same month The Spirit of ’43 was released, seventeen Mexican American youths were convicted of the murder of another, Jose Diaz, at Sleepy Lagoon, California. Throughout their trial the prosecution focused on the defendants’ ‘zoot suits, their haircuts, and mangy appearance’, the latter resulting from the judge’s refusal to allow them to change their clothes. Their supporters argued that the prosecution criminalized zoot suits, pachuco haircuts, and being born in the United States of Spanishspeaking parents.123 The zoot-suit film was to be screened at each of America’s 16,466 cinemas; as the Evening Star pointed out, ‘its audience – every single moviegoer in the United States – will be greater than that of any other picture ever made’.124 In such a context it is unsurprising that Donald Duck’s violent assault on the zoot suiter was to prove alarmingly prescient and in June 1943 the Zoot Suit Riots erupted in Los Angeles. While the name implies the disturbances were initiated by the zoot suiters, they were a series of attacks on zoot-suit wearers of colour by white servicemen and vigilantes who tore off the suits, ripped, burned, and urinated on them (Figure 23.10).125 As the peace journal Fellowship noted, ‘the rioting was distinctly racial in character’. Mexican youths were the main targets but the assailants ‘were willing to compromise on Negroes’, threatening at least one uniformed solider ‘simply because he was a Negro’.126 Ironically, the Washington Post described the zoot suiters as ‘hoodlums’, transferring the nomenclature for a group of sartorially conscious, 122

123 124 125 126

Evening Star (Washington, DC), 7 March 1943, 6; The Spirit of ’43 (Walt Disney Productions, 1943), www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNMrMFuk-bo (accessed 15 July 2020). Howard, ‘Zoot to Boot’, 115. The convictions were overturned in 1944. Evening Star (Washington, DC), 7 March 1943, 6. Cosgrove, ‘The Zoot-Suit’, 81–2; Howard, ‘Zoot to Boot’, 116–17. Fellowship, July 1943, 131.

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Figure 23.10 ‘Police in Suits Arrest Kid in Zoot Suit’. Police taking into custody zoot-suited youth during the California ‘Zoot Suit Riots’, 6 June 1943. Photograph Bettmann via Getty Images.

violent, nineteenth-century white racists to the stylish 1940s subjects of white racial violence.127 For young Mexican Americans zoot-suit culture was a way to rebel against their parents’ traditional Mexican values, regain control of their bodies, and challenge dehumanization, by taking care and pride in their appearance.128 For Malcolm X, his adolescent zoot suit, though not his straightened ‘conk’ hair, was ‘part of being “black”’. But recordings, in-person appearances, photographs and 127 128

Cosgrove, ‘The Zoot-Suit’, 81. Griswold del Castillo, ‘Los Angeles “Zoot Suit Riots”’, 369; Alvarez, Power of the Zoot, 89.

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films of performers, including Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and the all-Black cast of Stormy Weather made Black style known and desirable internationally.129 And so despite their very specific racial origins and totemic significance for the marginalized communities of Harlem and California, zoot-suit dress and culture were eagerly adopted multiracially by youth throughout North America and beyond including the Caribbean, South Africa, Europe, and Britain.130 And as they spread more widely, the inseparable trio of suit, jazz music, and dance became for youth internationally a self-affirmatory, collective way of ‘distinguishing oneself from “squares” as well as children’.131

conclusion The nineteenth-century increase in maritime transport resulted in the global circulation of both used and cheap ready-made clothing and the emergence of a street style shared by gangs of urban nonelite Caucasian young men across the continents of Europe, North America, and Australia. As a variant of labourers’ workwear, it was quite separate from mainstream fashions. But it was as specific in its detail and had the same power to both include and exclude, demonstrating the manifold nature of fashion and the importance across the social spectrum of bodily adornment and sartorial selfdetermination. Gang members dressed to display, to impress their peers and differentiate themselves from those in authority who were often outraged, unsettled, or bemused by their appearance and behaviour. Based on a model of tough homosocial masculinity and the assumption of white racial supremacy, nineteenth-century street style gave its largely disenfranchised wearers cultural capital, endowing them with a sense of collective and personal identity, status, and agency. Margaret Maynard notes the normalization of European dress in the nineteenth century through colonizers’ insistence that it be 129

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Carol Tulloch, The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 131; Howard, ‘Zoot to Boot’, 113; Peiss, Zoot Suit, 45. Peiss, Zoot Suit, 57–8, 163–6, 170. Daniels, ‘Los Angeles Zoot’, 208, 210.

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worn by the Indigenous people of Australia.132 Likewise, large quantities of slop goods exported to America were bought by plantation owners to clothe the enslaved.133 This history of imposition was reversed in the twentieth century when the colonized took European dress and made it their own, aided by the global influence of Hollywood cinema, magnetic and two-faced, which replaced the workwear mode of street style with a fantasy of glamorous sophistication. Its offer of temporary sartorial escape from hard lives was eagerly grasped by young workers like the Filipino migrants in California. Fashion was not the preserve of the colonizers. But Roces argues that while the Filipinos’ fashionable suits gave them dignity, they were nevertheless striving to achieve the ideals of white American masculinity.134 This was not so with the zoot suit, whose African American and Mexican American originators not only set their own sartorial agenda, but set the fashion internationally for a generation of youth of all colours. Hollywood on the one hand presented the zoot suit – and by association its original wearers – as a threat to national security, but on the other helped to make Black style and culture desirable. For youth around the world, dress was a crucial aspect of racial and generational identity, and the zoot suit became the ‘uniform’ of jitterbug, the keystone of a unifying spectacular subculture through which young adherents globally, male and female, could differentiate themselves from their parents’ generation and pave the way to adulthood. It is too simplistic to state a linear trajectory between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century youth gangs and the later groups, such as teddy boys and punks, that emerged in the changed social, political, and economic circumstances after 1945. Nevertheless, these earlier groups are compelling evidence that provocative dress and behaviour were the means by which disenfranchised urban youth in the industrial West expressed difference, challenged authority, and transgressed dominant cultural codes long before the identification of post-Second World War spectacular subcultures. 132 133

Maynard, Fashioned from Penury, 65. Lambert, ‘Check Shirts’, 91–3. 134 Roces, ‘“These Guys”’, 536.

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select bibliography Alvarez, Luis, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press: 2009). Bellanta, Melissa, Larrikins: A History (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2012). Bellanta, Melissa and Alana Piper, ‘Looking Flash: Disreputable Women’s Dress and “Modernity”, 1870–1910’, History Workshop Journal, 78 (2014), 58–81. Davies, Andrew, The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers, Britain’s First Youth Cult (Preston: Milo Books, 2009). España-Maram, Linda, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’ Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s– 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Khor, Denise, ‘“Filipinos are the Dandies of the Foreign Colonies”: Race, Labor Struggles, and the Transpacific Routes of Hollywood and Philippine Films, 1924–1948’, Pacific Historical Review, 81 (2012), 371–403. Lemire, Beverly, ‘A Question of Trousers: Seafarers, Masculinity and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress, c. 1600–1800’, Cultural and Social History, 15/3 (2016), 1–22. 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 (2015), 288–319. Pearson, Geoffrey, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983). Peiss, Kathy, Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Perrot, Michelle, ‘Dans le Paris de la Belle Epoque. Les “Apaches”, Premieres Bandes de Jeunes’, ERES: la lettre de l’enfance et de l’adolescence, 67 (2007), 71–8. Roces, Mina, ‘“These Guys Came Out Looking Like Movie Actors”: Filipino Dress and Consumer Practices in the United States, 1920s– 1930s’, Pacific Historical Review, 85 (2016), 532–76.

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FASHION AND TIME IN CHINA’S TWENTIETH CENTURY antonia finnane

In the year 2020, a pandemic traceable to a virus-rich species of horseshoe bat brought fashion weeks around the world to a halt. China was ground zero. With Hubei province in lockdown from late January and international borders soon closed to flights from anywhere in the country, few Chinese designers were able to attend the autumn/winter fashion weeks of February 2020.1 In Milan, hub of a Chinese regional cluster specializing in fashion,2 the Italian Fashion Chamber launched a ‘China we are with you’ campaign and compensated for the absence of Chinese designers with a virtual display of their works.3 In Paris a week later, the only show from China was a gallery display by Uma Wang. Facemasks were the accessory of the day. Soon fashion workshops all over the world would be churning them out.4 1

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Forbes China, ‘2020 Guoji sida shizhuangzhou luomu, 58 wei Huaren shejishi liangxiang 2020 国际四大时装周落幕, 58 位华人设计师亮相 [As the Curtain Falls on the Four Big Fashion Weeks of 2020, 58 Chinese Designers Show Their Stuff]’, Forbes, 5 March 2020, www.forbeschina.com/life/47497 (accessed 1 September 2020); Yaling Jiang, ‘Interview: Mukzin Adds a Touch of Ancient China to New York Fashion Week’, Jing Daily, 12 February 2020, https://jingda ily.com/interview-mukzin-adds-a-touch-of-ancient-china-to-new-york-fashionweek/ (accessed 1 September 2020). Andrea Ganzaroli and Ivan De Noni, ‘The Rise of the Chinese Regional Cluster Specializing in Fashion in Lombardy: An Evolutionary Analysis’, Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy, 11/4 (2017), 493. Forbes China, ‘2020 Guoji sida shizhuangzhou luomu, 58 wei Huaren shejishi liangxiang 2020’. Jacqueline Baylon and Kevin Reilly, ‘Fashion Brands Are Reopening Their Factories and Making Millions of Face Masks to Fight the Coronavirus-Related Shortage’, Business Insider Australia, 23 April

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The outbreak of the pandemic coincided with and intensified a trade war between China and the United States. In the five months to May 2020, China’s exports of clothing to the United States were down 43.1 per cent, its market share plunging by more than half compared to the same period in 2019.5 Markets elsewhere were posing long-term challenges. Under these circumstances, Beijing turned for a solution to local consumers, hoping that domestic markets might be able to absorb what foreigners were no longer buying.6 The problem was an economic one, but it had political underpinnings and ideological expression. A rising tide of national goods consciousness was already marked among teenagers and young adults (the 1995+ cohort). Across the board, clothing dominated national goods consumption.7 More than a century after the boycott of American goods in 1905,8 China’s ‘new national goods’ movement carries distinct echoes of that earlier time, with trade, international relations, and ideology becoming intimately bound up in what people buy and wear. In contrast to circumstances in the early twentieth century, a fashion industry, scene, and discourse are now part of Chinese life. They are intimately connected to national prestige – what

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2020, www.businessinsider.com.au/face-masks-coronavirus-fashionbrands-2020-4?r=US&IR=T (accessed 1 September 2020). Sheng Lu, ‘COVID-19 and U.S. Apparel Imports’, FASH455 Global Apparel & Textile Trade and Sourcing (blog), 6 May 2020, https://shenglufashion.com/ 2020/05/06/covid-19-and-u-s-apparel-imports-updated-may-2020/ (accessed 1 September 2020). Office of the State Council, ‘Guowuyuan bangongting guanyu zhichi chukou chanpin zhuanneixiao de shishi yijian 国务院办公厅关于支持出口产品转内销 的实施意见 [Suggestions of Office of the State Council on Implementing Support for the Diversion of Export Products to Domestic Consumption]’, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo zhongyang renmin zhengfu 中华人民共和国中 央人民政府 [Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China], 22 June 2020, www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2020-06/22/content_5521078 .htm (accessed 1 September 2020). ‘95 hou yanzhong de “guochao” zhang sha yang? Peise yao goujing, nannü qi chaoku 95 后眼中的‘国潮’长啥样? 配色要够靓、男女齐潮酷 [What Should “Chinese Fashion Designs” Look Like in the Eyes of the Post-1995 Generation? Bold and Bright, Trendy and Cool Whether Male or Female]’, CBNData xiaofeizhan 消费占, 22 June 2020. Guanhua Wang, In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001).

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Nathaniel Beard terms ‘the “It” factor’ in fashion.9 In the case of contemporary China, ‘It’ is squarely founded on a grand narrative of five thousand years of history and a raft of claims to historical firsts from silk to the discovery of the South China Sea.10 The terms of analysis for fashion in China show the relationship. In history, Christine Tsui argues, ‘the words shiyang and shishizhuang [contemporary modes] reveal that the Chinese people were making a distinction between prevalent stylish clothing and ordinary clothing much earlier than in the west’.11 In a related vein, Zhang Hao and Sun Jinghao point out that bespoke tailoring originated in the courts of feudal times, whether in China or Europe, and that its modern development (far from being a case of China following Europe) is simply an outcome ‘of historical necessity’.12 Promoters of hanfu, an ethno-nationalist style of dress based on costumes of antiquity, bypass fashion altogether in the interests of restoring the notionally timeless clothing culture of the Han (Chinese) people (Figure 24.1).13 These approaches show that the prestige of Chineseness is an established issue in cultural history.14 The issue preoccupies

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Nathaniel Daffyd Beard, ‘The “It” Factor: In Pursuit of the Commoditisation of Fashion’, in Jess Berry (ed.), Fashion Capital: Style Economies, Sites and Cultures (Freeland: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012), 53–66. On the ‘grand narrative’ and treatments of silk in that context, see Marzia Varutti, Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014), 70, 122–3. On claims concerning the South China Sea, see Peter A. Dutton, ‘An Analysis of China’s Claim to Historic Rights in the South China Sea’, in Yann-huei Song and Keyuan Zou (eds.), Major Law and Policy Issues in the South China Sea: European and American Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 59. Christine Tsui, ‘Fashion in the Chinese Context’, in M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik (eds.), Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity through Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 52. Tsui draws for comparison on a 1988 dictionary of etymology. Zhang Hao 张灏 and Sun Jinghao 孙静浩, ‘Chengyi dingzhi – fuzhuangye jingying moshi zhuanbian shi chutan 成衣定制 – 服装业经营模式转变之初探 [Preliminary Discussion of Transformation in the Business Models in the Garment Trade]’, Shandong fangzhi jingji 山东纺织经济, 5 (20 May 2010), 52. On hanfu, see Kevin Carrico, The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). On this issue in the Republican era, see Chia-ling Yang, ‘Image Makers of Fashionable Shanghai, 1910–1930’, in Christopher Breward and Juliette MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 148.

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Figure 24.1 Chinese students wearing hanfu, Melbourne, 21 November 2018. Photographed by the author.

designers in and out of China. London-based Huishan Zhang and Masha Ma ‘have nothing in common stylistically’, reports fashion journalist Huang Hung, ‘but both want to give “Made in China” a makeover’.15 The same is true of Feng Chen Wang, also Londonbased, whose 2018 ‘Made in China’ collection was meant to challenge the reigning view of ‘what “Made in China” means’.16 15

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Hung Huang, ‘ChinaFile: Made in China, Branded in Paris’, WWD, 7 March 2012, https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-features/chinafile-made-inchina-branded-in-paris-5778953/ (accessed 1 September 2020). Jason Dike, ‘Feng Chen Wang Wants to Change Social Stigmas’, Hypebeast, 4 January 2018, https://hypebeast.com/2018/1/feng-chen-wang-jordan-1made-in-china (accessed 1 February 2021).

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British-educated Mukzin founders George Feng and Kate Han want ‘to create a brand to showcase Chinese design language, that it can be modern and fashionable. Japan has been successful on this front.’ Likewise, Beijing-based couturier Lan Yu, a graduate of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology: ‘As a Chinese designer, I want to help change the perception of “Made in China”. I want the audience to see the amazing artisans of traditional Chinese art that has thousands of years of history, and to see a Chinese designer with international ambitions.’17 Fashion, time, and history are linked discursive categories.18 Walter Benjamin, when deliberating on the concept of history, turned immediately to fashion. He did not use it simply as a metaphor: rather, fashion ‘has a sense for the actual present’ and simultaneously moves ‘in the thickets of the past’.19 Fashion, in other words, consistently marks historical departures while simultaneously recouping the past in simpler or more complex forms. Given the variables in each of these categories (fashion, time, and history), it is to be expected that the pattern of connectedness should vary from place to place. This chapter shows the development of this three-way relationship in twentieth-century China, and its changing configurations over time. Following an introductory discussion on fashion, history, and the state in contemporary China, it explores the emergence of 17

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Ruby Veridiano, ‘At New York Fashion Week, Lan Yu Is Changing “Made in China”’, September 2016, www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/new-yo rk-fashion-week-debut-lan-yu-changing-made-china-n646956 (accessed 1 September 2020). See the wide-ranging and informative discussion in Caroline Evans and Alessandra Vaccari (eds.), Time in Fashion: Industrial, Antilinear and Uchronic Temporalities (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). For a summary review of approaches to the fashion–history nexus, see Malcom Barnard, Fashion Theory: An Introduction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), ch. 5, ‘Fashion and/in History’. On a non-Western context, see S. Heijin Lee, Christina H. Moon, and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, ‘Introduction’, in S. Heijin Lee, Christina H. Moon, and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu (eds.), Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 3. The Met’s 2020 exhibition ‘About Time’ plays on the relationship. See Andrew Bolton et al., About Time: Fashion and Duration (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020). Walter Benjamin, ‘Thesis XIV: On the Concept of History’, quoted in full in Andrew Benjamin, Style and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 29.

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Figure 24.2

Qipao fashions, 1930–6. Cartoon by Changyan. Xiandai jiating, no. 2 (February 1937), 52.

a nascent fashion industry in the first half of the twentieth century, with a focus on the qipao. The qipao neither marks the beginning nor exhausts the range of stylistic changes, trends, and fads in clothing in modern China. Yet as cartoons of the time show, its welldocumented changes in style lend it to an analysis of temporal change (Figure 24.2). Its virtual disappearance from the sartorial scene in the Mao years and re-emergence on the margins of a renewed fashion industry in the 1980s signalled the arrival of other temporalities again. The latter part of this chapter shows how distinctive these later periods were in terms of vestimentary practices, although the foundational effects of the qipao era in the production of a new logic of clothing culture continued to be evident.

fashion and history In the People’s Republic of China, as Jianhua Zhao points out, fashion is ‘permeated by the power of the state’.20 The key decision makers in the industry – managing fashion weeks, coordinating industry associations – are necessarily Communist Party members holding positions of authority. Any given fashion show will have a baffled-looking official or three sitting in the front row. As with other industries in China, this means that the fashion industry is 20

Jianhua Zhao, The Chinese Fashion Industry: An Ethnographic Approach (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 130.

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obliged to serve the Party. The China Fashion Association (CFA), established in 1993, is bound by its constitution to ‘support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in every respect, abide by the Party’s regulations of the Chinese Communist Party, establish a Party organization [within the association], conduct Party activities, and provide the necessary conditions for Party organization activities’.21 In practice, this means that fashion designers are called on to help the Party achieve its goals. An example is the recruitment of young creative designers of MoodBox and Mukzin to work with Uyghur embroiderers in Xinjiang, showing the alignment of the fashion industry with the Belt and Road Initiative and its related involvement in ethnic pacification.22 History is a significant thread in the state–fashion nexus. In contemporary China, history serves as an ideology to induce social cohesion and support the legitimacy of the state.23 For its part, fashion is regularly called upon to give expression to ideas of history and to help in its reframing. The celebration of the Qing Empire’s golden age through the deployment of historical Manchu styles on the catwalk is illustrative.24 Through such performances, the industry becomes complicit in helping to reinvent the past, in part through a ‘flattening’ of historical time.25 This reinvented 21

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Zhongguo fuzhuang shejishi xiehui 中国服装设计师协会, ‘Zhongguo fuzhuang shejishi xiehui zhangcheng 中国服装设计师协会章程 [Constitution of the China Fashion Association]’, fashion.org.cn, 2020, www.fashion.org.cn/ gywm/201202/t20120214_893270.html (accessed 1 September 2020). Further on the CFA, see Zhao, The Chinese Fashion Industry, 89. Zhao points out that at its founding, fewer than ten of the sixty-four members were designers, the remainder being Party officials and college professors. ‘Yi xiu wei mei: Xinjiang Hami shuqian shaosu minzu xiuniang shixian tuopin 以绣为‘媒’: 新疆哈密数千少数民族绣娘实现脱贫 [Embroidery as Broker: Thousands of Embroiderers in Hami, Xinjiang, Escape from Poverty]’, Xinhuawang, 3 November 2019, www.xinhuanet.com/2019-03/11/c_112422 1381.htm (accessed 1 September 2020); Jiang, ‘Interview: Mukzin Adds a Touch of Ancient China to New York Fashion Week’. Huaiyin Li, Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), 272. See the NE TIGER Haute Couture 2015 collection at China Fashion Week, 26 October 2015, www.china.org.cn/arts/2015–10/26/content_36888423_2 .htm (accessed 12 February 2021). The term is used repeatedly by Varutti of a process broadly observable in the post-Mao era. Varutti, Museums in China, 70, 130, 142.

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history is not contained within Chinese borders, but embraces a larger, China-centred world through the production of a ‘shared invented tradition’ along the Belt and Road corridors created in the second decade of the twenty-first century.26 The Silk Road International Fashion Week, launched in 2017, has supported the production process.27 The pattern is dynamic. Looking back from the twenty-first century to the twentieth, it can be seen that both history and fashion looked very different one hundred years ago. A fashion scene was then emerging in China, centred in but by no means entirely confined to Shanghai. By the late 1920s it was visibly flourishing while retaining a distinctively Chinese look. Core features of this clothing culture were erased during the Mao years, some never to be restored. In contemporary China, a welldeveloped fashion industry looks much like fashion industries elsewhere, including in ready-to-wear lines. Nonetheless, fashion in contemporary China shares important features both with the generally anti-fashion regime of the Mao years and with the nascent fashion enterprise of a century ago. In each of these periods, fashion has been entwined with the construction of a particular historical temporality. It is, to quote from a recent collection on this theme, ‘a set of narratives and practices that map Asian modernity’. Perhaps more than that, it has given Asian modernity a particular temporal structure.28

beginnings In a brief overview of the history of advertising in China, Jian Wang pointedly criticizes ‘those arguments that trace the roots of advertising to ancient China’, arguing rather that it was ‘a Western invention introduced to China at the turn of the twentieth century . . . [that] first flourished in Shanghai, China’s commercial 26

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Khun Enh Kuah, ‘China’s Soft Power: Culturalisation Along the Belt Road Corridors’, in M. N. Islam (ed.), Silk Road to Belt Road: Reinventing the Past and Shaping the Future (Singapore: Springer, 2018), 119. See Antonia Finnane, ‘Between Beijing and Shanghai: Fashion in the Party State’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), Paris, Capital of Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 117–39. Lee, Moon, and Tu, ‘Introduction’, 6.

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centre, in the 1920s and 1930s’.29 The same comment might be made of China’s fashion industry. It is true that trends and changes in dress styles associated with urban life, cultural flows, and consumption have been identified in many earlier contexts in China. These are difficult to discuss without reference to fashion, and the term is often used in scholarship on Chinese dress history.30 Yet to observers of the fashion scene in 1940s Shanghai, nothing about the clothing culture of their Qing dynasty grandparents seemed familiar. ‘We find it hard to realise that less than fifty years ago it seemed a world without end’, wrote Zhang Ailing in 1943 (Figure 24.3): ‘Such was the stability, the uniformity, the extreme conventionality of China under the Manchus that generation after generation of women clung to the same dress style.’31 Zhang overstates the quietness and stability of those three centuries but also shows how fashion served to structure her sense of historical time. Writing in her early twenties from the vantage point of occupied Shanghai in the middle of the Second World War, it seemed to her that the relative stability of dress in the preceding centuries represented a past that was truly gone. To the unknowability of the past was conjoined a certain knowledge of it, as shown in the same essay. Its sartorial features are the subject of Zhang’s opening paragraphs: the voluminous garments of silks and satins worn by members of the leisured class; the protocols governing how they were worn; their ornamentation 29

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Jian Wang, ‘China’, in John McDonough and Karen Egolf (eds.), The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 298. BuYun Chen, Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019); Rachel Silberstein, A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020); Antonia Finnane, ‘The Fashionable City? Glimpses of Clothing Culture in Qing Yangzhou’, in Lucie Olivova and Vibeke Børdahl (eds.), Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou (Stockholm: NIAS Studies in Asian Topics, 2009), 62–74. Eileen Chang [Zhang Ailing], ‘Chinese Life and Fashions’, XXth Century, 4/1 (1943), 54. Note that this is the original English-language version of the essay. See also Zhang Ailing 张爱玲, ‘Geng yi ji 更衣记’, in Liu yan 流言 [Written on Water], ed. Zhang Ailing 张爱玲 (Shanghai: Wuzhou shushe, 1944), 67–80; Eileen Chang [Zhang Ailing], ‘A Chronicle of Changing Clothes’, trans. Andrew E. Jones, positions: east asia cultures critique, 11/ 2 (2003), 427–41.

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Figure 24.3 Zhang Ailing in retro. For this 1944 photo, she put on a capacious Qing theatre jacket (ao) over her plain woollen qipao. From Zhang Ailing, Dui zhao ji: kan lao zhaoxiang bu (Reflective Notes: Looking through an Old Photograph Album) (Hong Kong: Huangguan Chubanshe, 1994), Plate 44.

with piping, trimming, and embroidery, all adding up to an excess of pointless detail. These details make up a temporally flattened sartorial vista, which in her account gives way at the end of the nineteenth century to something quite different. For Zhang, ‘the history of Chinese fashions consists almost exclusively of the steady elimination of those details’.32 The casual references in her essay to random historical developments in a generalized past give way to a systematic chronological discussion. The distancing of the past evident in the essay, and the profound sense of temporal difference expressed in it both seem keenly modern. The paradigm is surely Hegelian, with China ‘lying still outside the 32

Chang, ‘Chinese Life and Fashions’, 56.

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World’s History’ until railways linked the Treaty Ports on the coast to the interior.33 The development of this paradigm for fashion history is difficult to extricate from the history itself but, as suggested by Zhang’s essay, it was to a significant extent structured by the qipao, the iconic site of fashionable experiments and innovations in the Nationalist era (1928–49). For Zhang, changes in clothing provided a heuristic device to explain the changing times.34 She was interested in what they had to say about the subjectivity of the wearers: what they thought about and how they projected their clothed bodies in the context of the political and military upheavals of her time. These concerns were in turn related to the economic, social, and material circumstances of Republican-era China. Nearly all these connected issues are packed into the history of the qipao, itself a garment and a term of modern provenance although popularly associated with the qi ren ‘people of the Banners’, in other words the Manchus.35 Far from all Chinese fashionable change concerned this garment. Trousers, coats, jackets, shirts and ties, socks and stockings, all deserve closer study than has been accorded them.36 But the qipao was the most 33

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On the relationship between Zhang’s fashion consciousness and modernity more generally, see Esther M. K. Cheung, ‘The Ordinary Fashion Show: Eileen Chang’s Profane Illumination and Mnemonic Art’, in Kam Louie (ed.), Eileen Chang: Romancing Languages, Cultures, Genres (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 73–90. In Zhang’s account, the high-collared tunic with narrow cut trousers is given a date range beginning 1890 (earlier that can be supported by the evidence); the gathered skirt with trumpet sleeves characteristic of the May 4th era (i.e. not in evidence before the late 1910s) bears a date range of 1910–20; while the ‘advent of the long gown for women’ (qipao) is dated to 1921. On the Manchus, see Pamela Kyle Crossley, Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). On Manchu dress, see Silberstein, A Fashionable Century, 21–44. For a preliminary study of men’s tailored garments in the early twentieth century, with reference to cultural and technological exchange between China and Japan, see Hissako Anjo and Antonia Finnane, ‘Tailoring in China and Japan: Cultural Transfer and Cutting Techniques in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 263–88.

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commonly depicted and discussed fashion item in the emerging fashion scene of Republican China. During the Nanjing Era it was unarguably fashion’s most significant garment.37 If its heyday was brief, it was nonetheless at the centre of an emerging fashion discourse that survived the vicissitudes of political change to emerge in reconfigured form in the latter part of the century.

the qipao In the late nineteenth century, Han Chinese women of well-to-do families rarely appeared in public and when seen at all by foreigners were likely to be wearing pleated skirts with voluminous jackets. At this time, the word shimao (fashionable in the sense of stylish and up-to-date) was used mainly of courtesans, who in the foreignbuilt international settlement of Shanghai were to be seen in open carriages, vying with each other for visual effect.38 Respectable women even in Shanghai mostly stayed indoors. Beijing was different. Visiting the capital in 1890, American travel writer Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore was mesmerized by the sight of the ‘tall splendid Manchu women, who walk with sturdy tread freely on their full-grown, natural feet, and balance their magnificent headdresses with conscious pride’.39 Their headdress was referred to as liangbatou (two-handled headdress);40 on their

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Dating in Chinese history is frequently controversial. Did the war with Japan begin in 1931 or 1937? Did the Cultural Revolution come to an end in 1969, or did it drag on till the time of Mao’s death? However, the standard periodization in twentieth-century Chinese history is: Qing (Manchu) dynasty (1644–1912); Republic of China (1912–49); Nanjing Decade (1928–37); AntiJapanese War (1937–45); People’s Republic of China (1949–); Mao years (1949–76); Cultural Revolution (1966 [1969]–76); Reform Era (1978–2018). The dates given here are intended to give the general reader a broad sense of the time periods referred to in the chapter. Peter Carroll, ‘Refashioning Suzhou: Dress, Commodification, and Modernity’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 11/2 (2003), 447. For examples, see columns on the ‘fashionable Mademoiselle’ (shimao dajie 时 髦大姐) and ‘the more fashionable Mademoiselle’ (geng shimao dajie 更时髦 大姐) in Tongwen xiaoxian bao 同文消闲报, 31 May 1901, 2. Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, ‘The Streets of Peking’, Century Magazine, 58/6 (October 1899), 861. See Gary Wang, ‘Affecting Grandiosity: Manchuness and the Liangbatou Hairdo-Turned-Headpiece circa 1870s–1930s’, in Kyunghee Pyun and Aida

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Figure 24.4 Manchu women in winter dress, Beijing, 1900. Detail from photograph by James Ricalton. Library of Congress.

feet they wore elevated shoes that were shaped like horse hooves (matixie) or flower vases (huapenxie), or resembled small boats (chuanxie); their dress (chenyi) was a full-length robe, fastened on the right, with sleeves to the wrist at least. Over the robe they might wear a sleeveless vest (majia) or long A-line vest (da kanjian).41 Zhang Ailing may be correct that this ensemble was on the periphery of the sartorial landscape of Qing China, but it fascinated foreigners and was often captured by them on camera (Figure 24.4). The distinction between Manchu and Han Chinese clothing on women was very obvious. At an anti-footbinding meeting in 1897, Alicia Little was understandably surprised at the clothing of one participant, the daughter of China’s leading reformer Kang

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Yuen Wong (eds.), Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 167–92. See further, Silberstein, A Fashionable Century, 39.

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Youwei: ‘She wore Manchu dress, which puzzled us, as she is Cantonese. Her father had never allowed her feet to be bound . . . thus she, like several other Chinese ladies, considered the Manchu dress the most convenient.’42 For the young woman to wear a Manchu gown was consistent with her father’s ideology of national unity, especially unity between Manchus and Han,43 but the choice may have been forced by the question of what shoes a Chinese woman should wear if her feet were not bound. For late Qing women with natural feet, Manchu shoes were the main alternative to men’s shoes. A surge of anti-Manchu feeling around the turn of the century rendered Manchu dress unappealing to Han Chinese women. At this time, styles were anyway changing. In the early twentieth century, garments that had till then been worn wide and loose were increasingly cut close to the figure.44 In 1908, the high collar that was to become a signature feature of Chinese ‘traditional’ dress began making an appearance, eventually to be seen even in the clothing of Manchu women. Hairstyles changed, especially among the young. Bangs (liuhai) and sidelocks (dalasu) were the rage among young women and were copied by their male peers (Figure 24.5).45 Around the time of the 1911 Revolution the fashionable young Chinese woman was wearing a high-collared tunic worn over straight-legged trousers, often with leather shoes. Skirts remained de rigueur, worn over trousers by respectable women in public and by girl students, but the skirts themselves were changing from Chinese pleated to Western gathered style. Tunics were fitted to the body. Breasts were compressed by a ‘little vest’ (xiaoshan, xiaobanbi) designed to produce a streamlined body profile (Figure 24.6).46 This set the trend for a look that lasted through 42

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Mrs Archibald Little, Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them (London: Hutchinson & Company, 1900), 383. The daughter was presumably the eldest, Kang Tongwei 康同薇 (1878–1974). Peter Zarrow, After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 150–4. Chang, ‘Chinese Life and Fashions’, 56. Shibao 时报, 30 July 1905 [28th of 6th lunar month], 6; 1 July 1909 [25th of 5th lunar month], 5. Jun Lei, ‘“Natural” Curves: Breast-Binding and Changing Aesthetics of the Female Body in China of the Early Twentieth Century’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 27/1 (2015), 163–223.

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Figure 24.5 Cartoon, 1910, depicting changes in the hairstyle among young men in Shanghai. From right to left: ten years ago, five years ago, three years ago, now (1910); and the future. Shenzhou ribao, 1910.

Figure 24.6 Chinese girl students, some time after 1910. Most are wearing high-collared tunics of narrow cut, straight skirts (probably over trousers), and leather shoes. The teacher’s rather old-fashioned skirt in brilliant embroidered satin contrasts with the modern-style, buttoned skirt of the student to her left. George Grantham Bain collection, Library of Congress.

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the 1910s, with the height of the collar gradually rising. In 1915, young women in Changsha were shocking their elders ‘with collars standing as high as the nose, or [tops] barely reaching to the waist or breasts constrained so tightly as to look like bundled fuel, or sleeves so short as to expose the elbows when stretching out a hand’.47 In these years, immediately following the fall of the dynasty, Manchu clothing virtually disappeared from the public eye, except insofar as the plain long gown worn by men could be described as Manchu. The high headdresses that had once floated down the streets of Beijing on the heads of Manchu women became, wrote one visitor, ‘as rare as butterflies in autumn, visible only in side alleys’, disappearing quickly if observed.48 On stage, however, Manchu costume had enhanced visibility. Male actors wore stylized Manchu women’s dress to play certain female roles while female stage performers often donned male dress, the long gown and short riding jacket (changpao magua),49 which was definitively Manchu in origin, topped by the ubiquitous melon-skin hat (guapimao) or, more fashionably a slouch cap. The effect was two-way. On the one hand, stage costume changed with the fashions. Ma Xiuying, wearing Manchu costume to play Princess Iron Mirror in 1924, wore a noticeably shorter garment than Jing Yufeng in 1916. Not only had the hem come up; sleeves, too, were shorter, exposing the wrists and lower arms (Figure 24.7).50

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‘Xiang xunshi qudi funu¯ shizhuang 湘巡使取締婦女服裝 [Hunan Inspecting Censor’s Prohibition of Women’s Dress]’, Xinwenbao 新闻报, 20 November 1915. Reginald Farrer, On the Eaves of the World (London: AMS Press, 1975), 29. There is as yet no standardized English vocabulary for various items of historical Chinese clothing. The use of ‘riding jacket’ here has to be understood in historical and cultural context lest it convey the ‘impression of the tweeds and “pinks” worn by English riders and huntsmen’, as observed in Valerie Pellatt, Eric T. Liu, and Yalta Ya-Yun Chen, Translating Chinese Culture: The Process of Chinese–English Translation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 67. Although few men who wore the magua would have been able to ride, the etymology of the term justifies the translation used here. The origins of the magua lie in the clothing culture of the horse-riding Manchus. The name retains the memory of that fact. On the role of Princess Iron Mirror in the popular Beijing opera Silang Visits His Mother (Silang tanmu 四郎探母), see Tan Ye, Historical Dictionary of Chinese Theater (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 289–90.

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Figure 24.7 Jing Yufeng (left) and Ma Xiuying (right), wearing Manchu costume to play Princess Iron Mirror in performances eight years apart. By 1924, the hem of the stage costume had come up, and the wrists were exposed, showing the impact of fashion on theatrical costume. Xinshijie, 4 October 1916, p. 2; Hongbao, 3 July 1924, p. 3.

On the other hand, stage costume had an impact on fashions. In 1919, Beijing drum song artist Liu Cuixian caused a sensation when she arrived in Shanghai to perform in the Great World entertainment centre. Her stage costume was a full-length man’s gown worn with riding jacket. In this same year, high-class courtesans (mingji) in Shanghai and nearby cities were reported to be wearing gowns (pao) in the Banner (qi) style. The fashion was attributed to the fact that courtesans moved in the same circles as stage performers; but as contemporaries noted, where courtesans led, others followed.51

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Tiantai Shannong 天台山农, ‘Nüzi qipao ganyan 女子穿旗袍感言 [Impressions of Women Wearing qipao]’, Dashijie 大世界, 14 December 1919. On the theatre as a social space for courtesans, see Christian Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 40–1.

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Manchu-style dress had crossed back from the stage to public life. The term qipao began to gain currency. Recently to this time, as Chia-ling Yang has shown, a fashion literature had been taking shape. Drawings and commentary in newspapers and periodicals were helping to shape taste.52 Partly on this account we can see that the qipao identified at this time was not a core item of dress, but an overcoat. Rivalling and apparently displacing the Western woollen overcoat and the Chinese mantle (yikouzhong),53 it appeared on the fashion scene as winter approached, to be worn over the fashionable daytime ensemble of ‘short trousers, long socks, left-fastening tops, [and] sleeveless vests’.54 The early-generation qipao sketched by Zhang Ailing, dated by her to 1921, is shown as worn with a scarf, confirming the winter setting.55 A 1922 design by artist Chen Yingxia shows a more fashionable garment, made of red silk sprigged with chrysanthemums, sleeves trimmed with fur at the wrist, the garment evidently padded with cotton wadding (Figure 24.8).56 Between the overcoat-style qipao of 1919 and the sheath-like dress of the 1930s, there was a considerable design gap, which in part explains the tendency to date the rise of the qipao to the mid1920s.57 The qipao dress has mixed origins, as pointed out by Shi Lei, with a mixture of sleeved and sleeveless garments, long and short ‘fusing [in the form of the qipao] around 1926’.58 The thing 52 53

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Yang, ‘Image Makers of Fashionable Shanghai’, 136–7. Duhe 独鹤, ‘Dayi yu qipao 大衣与旗袍 [Overcoat and qipao]’, Xinwenbao 新闻 报, 13 January 1921. Shannong, ‘Nüzi qipao ganyan’. Cf. Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 142 where the origins of the qipao are dated to the mid-1920s at earliest, and Zhang Ailing’s dating is questioned. Sources cited in the present article are clearly at variance with this earlier conclusion. Chen Yingxia 陈映霞, ‘Haishang liuxing de qipao 海上流行的旗袍 [The qipao Trending in Shanghai]’, Shibao tuhua zhoukan 时报图画周刊, 82 (16 January 1922). On Chen, see Yang, ‘Image Makers of Fashionable Shanghai’, 164–6. Biang Xiangyang and Yan Lanlan, ‘Shanghai qipao, 1925–1949’, in Breward and MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai, 67–8; Finnane, Changing Clothes, 149. Shi Lei 石磊, ‘Jindai Shanghai fushi bianqian yu guannian jinbu 近代上海服饰 变迁与观念进步 [Changes in Shanghai Clothing and Advances in Outlook in Modern Times]’, Dang’an yu shixue 档案与史学, 3 (2003), 36–9.

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Figure 24.8

The qipao as overcoat. Sketch by Chen Yingxia. Shibao tuhua zhoukan, no. 82 (16 January 1922).

they have in common is that unlike the trousers and tunic fashion of the 1910s or the skirt and blouse fashion of the 1920s, they are both one-piece garments. Once united under one name, their separate histories were conflated, and a single genealogy was created, as though one had led chronologically to the other (Figure 24.9). In fact, the qipao coat had an obvious direct descendant, in the form of the wide-sleeved qipao dress, sometimes referred to as the Beijing style (as shown in Ye Qianyu’s 1927 cartoon in Figure 24.9). The close-fitting style that won out was more obviously related to the majia (sleeveless vest) and chang majia (long vest, or surcote),59 both much in evidence in the 1920s as designers 59

This term for a long sleeveless overgarment provides a useful equivalent in English to majia. See Sarah Thursfield, The Medieval Tailor’s Assistant: Common Garments 1100–1480 (Ramsbury: Crowood, 2015), 66–8.

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Figure 24.9 Creating fashion chronology: graphic artist Ye Qianyu constructs a brief timeline of the qipao, 1924–7. Shanghai huabao, no. 304 (18 December 1927), p. 2.

experimented with variations on classic Chinese styles. In pictorial publications, there is a notable gap between the photographic record and advertising or fashion features, with the wide-sleeved, square-cut qipao strongly in evidence in the late 1920s while graphic artists were creating images of the streamlined qipao of the future (Figure 24.10).

becoming fashion What turned the qipao from a garment into a fashion? In a useful review of fashion as a cultural industry, Jennifer Craik identifies the features of a fashion city: its material culture, manufacturing and infrastructure, modes of communication, patterns of retail, and a fashion community including not only ‘celebrities, photographers,

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Figure 24.10 Ye Qianyu’s 1929 design for a figure-hugging qipao. Shidai huabao no. 3 (March, 1929), p. 24.

models, stylists’ but everyday agents of fashion such as fashion retailers and shop-assistants who themselves wear (and thus display and advertise) the smart clothing they sell in the spaces of consumption that they inhabit. The fashion city itself, at least as a historical formation,60 is constituted by all these activities, people, and materialities in dynamic interrelationship with each other, and holds out to citizens and visitors alike the promise of ‘a plethora of experiences, human interactions and opportunities’.61

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For a critique of the ‘fashion city’ model in the globalized world, see David Gilbert and Patrizia Casadei, ‘The Hunting of the Fashion City: Rethinking the Relationship between Fashion and the Urban in the Twenty-First Century’, Fashion Theory, 24/3 (May 2020), 393–408. Jennifer Craik, ‘Fashion: An Urban Industry of Style’, in Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication (New York: Routledge, 2018), 304–13.

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All these elements were visible in early twentieth-century Shanghai. As Zhang Ailing points out, ‘fashion in China [was] not an industry under control of a few great fashion houses’,62 yet there is something between fashion as big business and the scarcely explicable organic phenomenon that she goes on to describe. In the 1920s, new forms of media, retail and industry conglomerations, international trade, and cultural flows produced by trade and migration converged to provide inspiration and support for an emerging fashion industry. The same factors were operative in the emergence of women of genteel families to public view. From the inner quarters that had contained their mothers and grandmothers, young women sallied forth to congregate in public parks, shops, sports fields, and university campuses. Their photographs appeared in newspapers and magazines. In 1929, Fox Movietone News filmed a short fashion parade meant to show the English-speaking world what fashionable Chinese women were wearing. The compere and the models were the wives and daughters of eminent men.63 More influentially than any professional model troupe, young women such as these, connected with the arts, politics and diplomacy, and big business, served to generate fashion through their highly visible social and professional lives. Habits of consumption among these young women were fed by the great ‘universal providers’ (department stores) of Nanjing Road, whose founders brought overseas experience, business acumen, and retail models from Sydney to Shanghai via Hong Kong and Canton.64 Like department stores everywhere, these were pivotal

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Chang, ‘Chinese Life and Fashions’, 61. They included Shi Huizhen 施惠珍 (1906~2004), niece of politician and diplomat Alfred Sze (Shi Zhaoji 施肇基, 1877–1958), her cousin Tang Baomei 唐宝玫 (1902~1941) daughter of former premier Tang Shaoyi 唐绍仪(1862–1938), and Xiao Baolian 萧宝莲 (1909~84), wife of prominent architect Robert Fan (Fan Wenzhao 范文照, 1893–1979). The footage is held by University of South Carolina. An edited and colourized version is available at www.youtube.com /watch?v=sIYjspeZxQ0&feature=share (accessed 12 February 2021). On the department stores, see Wellington K. K. Chan, ‘Selling Goods and Promoting a New Commercial Culture: The Four Premier Department Stores on Nanjing Road, 1917–1937’, in Sherman Cochran (ed.), Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999), 1–36. On the terminology for this form of retail in China, see Kerrie L. MacPherson, ‘Introduction: Asia’s Universal

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institutions in the development of Shanghai’s fashion industry and in historical accounts have overshadowed smaller scale fashion shops. The latter were critical components of the fashion scene. In Scenes of the City, a cinematic critique of materialism and moral turpitude in 1930s Shanghai, an out-of-pocket wannabe Shanghai writer spends his last silver dollar on a fashionable knitted jacket for the object of his affections, and he finds the jacket not in a department store such as Sincere or Wing On but in Hongxiang, the iconic fashion store on Jing’an Temple Road. Founded in 1917, upscaling dramatically in 1928 and further extended in 1931, Hongxiang was patronized by foreigners as well as Chinese.65 In the film, the novel attributes of a fashion shop (as opposed to an oldfashioned chengyipu or ‘clothes-making shop’) are foregrounded: the full-frontage glass display window with its mannequin, which invites the city into the shop; the shopfront counter and glass display case; the salesgirl, with her permed hair; the sales discount signs on the garments; and the box in which the purchased garment is packed, emblazoned with the name of the shop and serving as a mobile advertisement. As a romantic allure, the knitted jacket proves to be no match for the motorcar possessed by our hero’s rival in love, but worn by the girl in a sequence of scenes, it gives extensive exposure to Hongxiang’s products.66 Less successful in the long term but creating great excitement at the time of its founding was Yunshang, opened in 1927. More

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Providers’, in Asian Department Stores (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 1–30; Antonia Finnane, ‘Department Stores and the Commodification of Culture: Artful Marketing in a Globalizing World’, in J. R. McNeill and Kenneth Pomeranz (eds.), The Cambridge World History, Volume 7: Production, Destruction, and Connection 1750–Present, Part 2, Shared Transformations? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 141–4. Specifically on the department stores and fashion in Nanjing Road, see Finnane, Changing Clothes, 134–8. Christine Tsui, China Fashion: Conversations with Designers (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 10–13. In English the store was referred to as Hong Zang Bros, with an address at 181 Bubbling Well Road, the English name for Jing’an Temple Road. See e.g. The China Press, 2 May 1931, p. 2. Yuan Muzhi 袁牧之, Dushi fengguang 都市风光 [Scenes of City Life] (Diantong, 1935). The film is less famous than some others by this noted leftwing director but is often mentioned simply on account of its cast, which includes Mao Zedong’s wife-to-be, Jiang Qing 江青 (screen name Lan Ping 蓝 苹) and her then future husband, Tang Na 唐纳, whom she wed in 1936.

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obviously than Hongxiang and even than the great department stores, Yunshang gave expression to the profound social change that was producing, in Ferdinand Tönnies’ terms, society (Gesellschaft), ‘the subject and bearer of fashion’.67 Yunshang was associated with a veritable (male) who’s who of literature and the arts, including the philosopher Hu Shi and the poet Xu Zhimo, men who were sophisticated and cosmopolitan in outlook and interested in promoting a certain sort of visibility of and public presence for women.68 At the shopfront, however, were two young women: Lu Xiaoman, an accomplished painter whose divorce and subsequent marriage to Xu Zhimo had been the talk of the town in 1926;69 and the precocious Tang Ying, who at seventeen years of age was already much in the public eye.70 Lu and Tang epitomized a new (or at least reconfigured) social type in Chinese society, the mingyuan or ‘women of note’, a category also embracing the women in the 1929 Movietone feature. The term was historically used to denote women who achieved prominence in print, through the writing of poetry.71 The new mingyuan were accomplished young women who enjoyed social prominence through different sorts of performance.72 With poise, education, connections, and 67

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R. S. Koppen, Virginia Woolf: Fashion and Literary Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 118. Yecao 野草, ‘Ji Yunshang gongsi 记云裳公司 [Notes on Yunshang Company]’, Jingbao 晶报, 24 June 1927. See also Shanghai huabao 上海画报, 8 December 1927. Interest in the story was rekindled by a television series, Zeng Niangping 曾 念平 and Ding Yaming丁亚名, ‘Renjian Siyuetian 人间四月天 [April Days in This Human World]’, Zoom Hunt International Productions (Taiwan, 1999), which sparked a flurry of publications about the key figures involved. In English, the story is recounted from the perspective of Xu Zhimo’s first wife, Zhang Youyi, in Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, Bound Feet & Western Dress: A Memoir (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011). Baoen 宝恩, ‘Zuoye shizhuang biaoxianhui suji: shizhuang biaoxian Tang Ying bingwei jiaru 昨夜時裝表現會速記: 時裝表現唐瑛并未加入 [Notes on Yesterday Evening’s Fashion Show: Tang Ying Did Not Participate in the Fashion Display]’, Zhongguo sheying xuehui huabao 中国摄影学会画报, 12 December 1926. Grace S. Fong, Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 123. Guoliang 国亮, ‘Yingxiong de shiming 英雄的使命: 给国货时装表演的名媛 [An Heroic Mission: Accomplished Ladies Giving a Fashion Show of National Products]’, September 1930. For a glimpse of Tang Ying in performance mode, see Mei Mei Rado, ‘The Lady’s Fan: Fashion Accessories and Modern

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social ambitions, they were the influencers of their time. A very different style of ‘new woman’, Zhang Youyi (Xu Zhimo’s first wife) eventually became manager and the guiding hand behind the business, a position she combined with her role as director of the Women’s Bank.73 At the time of Yunshang’s founding, the wardrobe of fashionable women in China’s cities showed considerable diversity. In a media photograph taken in front of the shop’s display window, Tang Ying models a short skirt in dramatically striped fabric, while Lu Xiaoman wears a simple A-line qipao. The mannequin in the shop window has been dressed in a billowing skirt worn with fitted vest over blouse – a very 1920s style that has been largely lost to sight in the historicization of Chinese fashion (Figure 24.11). This diversity faded during the Nationalist era. The Nationalist government was installed in 1928, with the new capital in Nanjing. In 1929 a new set of formal dress regulations was issued.74 The long gown (pao) was approved as ceremonial dress for both men and women. The long jacket and skirt, in blue and black, respectively, were also approved, but clearly the time for that ensemble had passed.75 During the Nanjing decade the position of the qipao was consolidated. In the 1929 Fox Movietone News feature, compere Shi Huizhen wore a high-collared, waisted frock that she described

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Femininity in Republican China’, in Pyun and Wong (eds.), Fashion, Identity, and Power, 193–227. Luo Yuanxu 羅元旭, Dongcheng xijiu: qige Huaren jidujiao jiazu yu ZhongXi jiaoliu bainian 東成西就: 七個華人基督教家族與中西交流百年 [Eastern Achievement, Western Accomplishment: Seven Chinese Christian Families and a Century of Interchange between China and the West] (Hong Kong: Sanlian, 2012), 153. These were widely published in 1929, although not always with illustrations. But see ‘Fazhi: fuzhi tiaoli 法制: 服制条例 [System of Laws: Clothing Regulations]’, Jin-Pu tielu gongbao 津浦铁路公报, 10 March 1929; Liu Yuqi, 刘玉琪, ‘Jindai Zhongguo de “zhifu zhi dao” – 1912 nian yu 192 nian fuzhi de banbu yu shixing 近代中国的‘制服之道” – 1912 年与 1929 年服制的颁布与施行 [The way of the uniform in modern China: the proclamation and implementation of the clothing system in 1912 and 1929)’, Shilun kongjian 史论空间, 306 (2018), 107. Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China 1911–1929 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 192.

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Figure 24.11 Lu Xiaoman and Tang Ying, ‘social influencers’ of the 1920s, photographed in front of their Yunshang fashion shop. Tianpeng huabao, 17 November 1927, p. 13.

as evening wear, but it was the wide-sleeved qipao worn by Xiao Baolian that she described as the most popular day dress. The qipao excited controversy at every stage. In the beginning, its critics were mainly unhappy about Chinese women wearing Manchu clothing. In the 1930s, when it took the form of a figurehugging sheath dress with long side slits, it was criticized on grounds of modesty or propriety. The cloth that was used to make it was debated in national products campaigns aimed at supporting the nation and resisting its enemies.76 Accessories 76

Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 22.

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worn with it were even more likely than the cloth itself to have been imported. Research on advertisements for the Yunshang shows that many advertisements – more than one in three – were for overcoats and mantles,77 garments that were significant sites of international fashion in the 1930s. Underneath the coat, however, was the qipao, itself subject to fashionable trends as Zhang Ailing remarks, but remaining the default garment for Chinese women through to 1949, and worn by the very workers in the factories. As a one-piece garment that was at least not Western in design, it was defended as symbolizing the unity of the nation.78

marking time As the qipao became first an established and then a dominant form of women’s clothing, changes in its style were tracked, either descriptively or graphically, sometimes both, in the very magazines that were helping to establish it as the fashion of the Nationalist era (see Figures 24.2 and 24.9). Comparable timelines exist for other aspects of fashion: hairstyles, as shown in Figure 24.5;79 the vest or surcote, traced from granny’s apronstyle overall to modern girl’s cardigan;80 the ‘little vest’ worn as underwear, through various stages from stomacher to chemisestyle;81 women’s fashion in general, from old-fashioned rural jacket and trousers to modern qipao.82 In each of these cases, a line of progress is created, taking the viewer from past to present 77

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Gong Jianpei 龚建培 and Yan Yishu 严宜舒, ‘Cong “Shanghai Manhua” guanggao zhong kuitan Shanghai fuzhi shishang de bianqian (1928–1930) 从 《上海漫画》广告中窥探上海服饰 时尚之变迁 (1928–1930) [A glimpse of changes in Shanghai fashions from advertisements in Shanghai Sketch Magazine]’, Fuzhuang Xuebao 服装学报, 2/2 (April 2017), 154; Zhang Weiwei 张炜炜, ‘Cong “Shanghai Manhua” kan Yunshang gongsi shishang de yingxiang 从《上海漫画》看云裳公司 对民国上海女装时尚的影响 [The influence of Yunshang Company on Shanghai women’s clothing in light of the Shanghai Sketch Magazine]’, Fangzhi baogao 纺织报告, 121 (2018), 68. Guo Weilin 郭维麟, ‘Mantan nüren de fushi 漫谈女人的服饰 [Talking about Women’s Dress and Adornment]’, Furen huabao, 48 (June–July 1937), 4–6. See also cartoon by Guo Jianying 郭建英 in Finnane, Changing Clothes, 158. Wenhua yishu xuekan 文化艺术学刊, 18 February 1931, 37. Lei, ‘“Natural” Curves’; Finnane, Changing Clothes, 163–4. Kuaile jiating 快乐家庭, 1/6 (1936), 7.

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and sometimes even the future in blocks of time. A similar impression is left by photographs of times past, again using blocks of time, with costumes from ‘twenty years ago’ or ‘thirty years ago’ looking quaint and antiquated alongside those worn by modern young women whose photos appear alongside these historical images, illustrating the deep gulf between past and present.83 Zhang Ailing’s evolutionary narrative, tracing a qipao style from 1921 to the 1940s in both text and pictures, is true to this pattern.84 The effect is to illustrate, graphically, the role played by fashion in structuring modern time, with the fashion drawings themselves being contributing factors. In retrospect, it would be possible to impose a timeline of this sort on the fashions of earlier centuries, even if the changes over time were less rapid and the blocks of time much larger. That neither Zhang nor any of her contemporaries did this suggests a sense on their part of inhabiting a different sort of time. It was demonstrably a linear time, where notable events – in this case hairstyles or hemlines – could be organized in a line and counted out by reference to chronological year names. Luke Kwong argues that different sorts of time continued to be operative in Chinese society well after a ‘linear narrative of the past’ had been developed within the political sphere;85 but the linear narrative clearly applied to, and was supported by, Republican-era fashion. In 1947, as a civil war succeeded the Anti-Japanese War, a cartoon in the right-wing newspaper Libao again showed in sequence the changing fashions of the last few decades (Figure 24.12). The cartoonist, Yufei (Li Binsheng), only twenty-two years old at the time, failed to capture the look of earlier styles, but demonstrated the

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There are many examples in the early 1930s pictorial magazine Fengyue huabao 风月画报. See for example ‘Sishinian qian mingji de zhuangshu 四十年前名妓的装束 [Dress of Well-Known Courtesans Forty Years Ago]’, Fengyue, 10/19 (1937), 1. Zhang’s oft-republished chronological sequence of fashion drawings appears in the first, English-language version of her essay. See Chang, ‘Chinese Life and Fashions’. The sequence is published also in Andrew Jones’ translation, Chang, ‘A Chronicle of Changing Clothes’. A quite different set of sketches appears in the first (1944) Chinese edition, and none at all in the second (1945) edition, despite the same publisher bringing out the two editions. Luke S. K. Kwong, ‘The Rise of the Linear Perspective on History and Time in Late Qing China c. 1860–1911’, Past & Present, 173 (2001), 190.

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Figure 24.12 ‘The Evolution of Dress’. Cartoon by Yufei (Li Binsheng). Libao, 6 October 1947, p. 2.

power of the paradigm of linear time, which revealed patterns of change not only in retrospect but in advance.86 At this time the qipao itself was entering into uncharted waters, although not quite those imagined by the young cartoonist. In the summer of 1949, with half the country already in the hands of the Communist forces, the long qipao worn by ‘First Lady’ Song Meiling came under criticism as inappropriate for the summer, inconsistent with the emphasis on production (being wasteful of material), and more suited to sing-song girls and dance hostesses in Canton and Hong Kong than to the women of liberated Shanghai.87 Some years later, well after the Communist victory on the mainland and the retreat of the Nationalists to Taiwan, an advertisement for 1949 spring fashions was used by director Tang Xiaodan as a temporal place marker in City without Night, a film about Shanghai from the 1930s to the 1950s. Featuring the sketch of a qipao-clad woman,

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See Li Binsheng 李滨声, Li Binsheng huaji: manhua juan 李滨声画集: 漫画卷 [Li Binsheng’s Collected Artworks: Cartoons Volume] (Beijing: 民族出版社, 1997). Fengsan 风三, ‘Fandong de chang qipao 反动的长旗袍 [The Reactionary Long qipao]’, Dabao 大报, 14 July 1949.

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Figure 24.13 1949: end of the reactionary era? Tang Xiaodan, Bu ye cheng 不夜城 (City without Night) (Jiangnan dianying zhipianchang, 1957).

it was meant to signal not the beginning of the socialist era but the end of a reactionary one (Figure 24.13).88

old clothes in a new china The budding fashion industry of Republican China, derailed by the Anti-Japanese War, was destroyed by the Communist Revolution. The lives and livelihoods of most people closely associated with the Shanghai fashion scene were affected. Many left China altogether, moving to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, or the United States. Often they took their businesses with them. If they stayed in China, their talents were diverted to the service of the socialist state. Their shops were taken over by the state, either tout court, as in the case of Sincere, or in the form of the so-called ‘public–private joint venture’ as with Wing On and Hongxiang.89 Their clothes 88

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Tang Xiaodan 汤晓丹, Bu ye cheng 不夜城 [City without Night] (Jiangnan dianying zhipianchang 江南电影制片厂, 1957). Lynn T. White III, ‘Low Power: Small Enterprises in Shanghai, 1949–67’, The China Quarterly, 73 (March 1978), 45–76.

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were left in abandoned apartments, to be recycled through secondhand shops and reshaped by creative tailors. Old qipaos were cut up into shirts, jackets, and rompers for small children.90 Commercial advertising gave way to political propaganda.91 ‘Society’ disappeared, to be replaced by ‘the People’. Even the old calendar disappeared. For the first time, years were counted according to the Gregorian calendar. If the qipao was the representative garment of the Republican era, the so-called Mao suit was its heir in the opening decades of the People’s Republic. The term ‘Mao suit’, entering general use in English only after Mao’s death, covers the assortment of jacket and trousers combinations that constituted the wardrobe of townspeople. In Chinese these are retrospectively lumped together as the ‘three old’ (laosan) styles, a category that when unpacked proves to include a number of differently named styles: the Zhongshan suit, the Lenin suit, the People’s suit, the Youth suit, and others.92 These garments were differentiated by the number and style of pockets on the jacket, by the buttoning (one or two rows), and by the collars (erect or flat). They were not the only sort of clothes worn in the Mao years, but for men they were the most common (in urban contexts, at least), while for women even fewer varieties were available.93 Prescribed by and supplied for workplaces, subtly coded by colour and cut,94 such garments dominated the streetscape (Figure 24.14). 90

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Beijingshi qinggongyeju fuzhuang xie mao yanjiusuo bian 北京市轻工业局服 装鞋帽研究所编, Fuzhuang gaijiu fanxin fa 服装改旧翻新法 [How to Transform Old Clothes into New] (Beijing: Beijing Chubanshe, 1961). Ellen Johnston Laing, Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 223–33. Names and associated styles varied slightly from region to region and over time, but close to the full range is named and illustrated in Fuzhuang caifeng fuwubu jiti 服装裁缝服务部集体 (ed.), Fuzhuang cai yu feng 服装裁与缝 (Shanxi: Wutai nongtian jijian bingtuan wuying 五台农田基建兵团五营, 1977), 7. Antonia Finnane, ‘Disappearing from the Picture? Female Figures in Pattern Books of the Mao Years’, in Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Katarzyna Marciniak (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 475–99. See Tina Mai Chen, ‘Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender-Formation in Mao’s China’, Fashion Theory, 1/3 (2001), 333–60; Tina Mai Chen, ‘Proletarian White and Working Bodies in Mao’s China’, positions: east asia cultures critique, 11/2 (2003), 361–93.

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Figure 24.14 Holiday photos in Shanghai during the Mao years. The blue gowns have given way to jacket and trousers, sometimes compared by foreign observers to ‘blue boiler suits’. The backdrop is Broadway Mansions, a nineteen-storey apartment building completed in 1935, and a symbol of Shanghai’s modernity. Author’s collection.

In 1959 seventeen-year-old Wang Xuetai was startled to see a former fellow student wearing a long blue gown: At that time, the whole country was ‘leaping forward’. Not even old men wore robes. (After liberation, the greatest change in the external appearance of Beijing was the change in clothing. In the early fifties, no one could be seen wearing the long gown and riding jacket. Anyone with any education wore either a Lenin suit or a Zhongshan suit.) . . . Seeing a young person dressed thus was really rare.95

The distinctive look of the crowd on China’s city streets in the 1950s begs the question of how changes in appearance were so quickly and widely effected. Everyday speech, manners, and comportment are historical products;96 patterns and inflections are 95

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Wang Xuetai 王学泰, ‘Fuzhong xiaoji 附中小记 [Memoir of my affiliated middle school]’, in Suiyue liusheng 岁月留声 [Sounds from Past Times] (Beijing: Beijing Shuju, 2011), 49. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds.), A Cultural History of Gesture: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).

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established in the early years of life, and revolutions cannot easily erase them. Nonetheless, the change in 1949 was consistent with previous changes of regime in that it entailed a clear break with the dress practices of the preceding era. The transition from Yuan to Ming in 1368, from Ming to Qing in 1644, and from Qing to Republic in 1912 had in each case been marked by a directive on clothing. In the case of the People’s Republic of China, it has been said (including by the present author) that there was no official dress code, or ‘government decree’;97 yet there were so many regulations governing dress in so many occupational categories that they add up to a code.98 In all these cases of formal vestimentary change, it is evident that dress was invested with political and ethical as well as social meanings. In the apparently revolutionary context of Mao’s China, the continued association between dress and dress regulations on the one hand and ‘everything under heaven’ on the other testifies to the sustained importance of ritual as an organizing principle in dress even at a time when Confucian rites themselves were under attack. There is an emphasis in Confucian texts on outward appearance, on grounds that formal adherence to rites ensures substantive adherence to propriety.99 At the same time, the outer appearance should not be void of inner meaning.100 In this spirit, the Communist press had remarks to make on the turn towards Zhongshan and Lenin suits. ‘There was no objection to the wearing 97

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Yan Li, China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 120; Finnane, Changing Clothes, 202. See also (specifically on the Cultural Revolution period) Juanjuan Wu, Chinese Fashion from Mao to Now (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 2. See for instance Shandongsheng renmin zhengfu 山东省人民政府, ‘Wei zhixing zhongyang tongyi guiding geji renyuan fuzhuang shiyang yanse de tongzhi 为执行中央统一规定各级人员服装式样颜色的通知 [Notification in Support of the Central [Government’s] Unified Regulations for the Clothing Styles and Colours for Personnel at Every Level]’, Shandong zhengbao 山东政报, 2 (2 March 1950), 73–5. For a discussion of such regulations, see Antonia Finnane, How to Make a Mao Suit: Clothing the People of Communist China, 1949–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 83–89. James Legge (trans.), Confucius: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 228–36. Ch’u Chai and Winberg Chai (eds.), Li Chi: Book of Rites, trans. James Legge, 2 vols. (New York: University Books, 1967), ii, 280.

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of this costume’, as diplomat Richard Harris remarked, ‘but it was important to realise what it stood for . . . Was the heart pure and mind cleansed that lay behind the uniform?’101 From this perspective, the high degree of conformity observable in dress during the Mao years seems a sign not of a ‘New China’ but of a very old one, operating in accordance with a dynastic cycle of renewal. The ‘land of the blue gown’ had become ‘the land of the blue boiler suit’.102 The creation of a new, socialist clothing system (proper, simple, frugal) entailed the eradication of the old one. Mao Zedong saw the past as a dead weight holding China mired in a swamp of semifeudal, semi-colonial ideas and habits. He viewed the masses of the people as not only poor, which they surely were, but also blank, like a piece of paper on which he could inscribe a new world outlook. Under his guidance, the future was reconfigured. In the heady days of the Republic, cartoonists had occasionally imagined the future in the form of ever more extreme or bizarre styles of dress. In the PRC they were asked to sketch out a different sort of future. On the quilt covers of beds in rural households, peacocks and blossoms gave way to images of electric cable towers and mushroom clouds.103 During the Cultural Revolution there was a sustained attack on the ‘four olds’ (customs, culture, habits, ideas), conducted largely by an army of young Red Guards in their quasi-military uniforms. ‘Strange clothing and outlandish dress’ came under attack. In 1966 it was reported that ‘all tailors’ shops have put up notices that they will not take orders for tight trousers, “cowboy shirts”, low-front and sleeveless suits or fantastic garbs. All barbershops have declared that they will refuse to do “strange” hair styles.’104 Under the banner of ongoing revolution, the future 101

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Richard Harris, ‘Marxist Shanghai’ (London, 28 August 1950), 5, FO37183253. On the first of these terms, see Mrs Archibald Little, The Land of the Blue Gown (New York: Brentano’s, 1902). For use of the second, see inter alia Robert Guillain, 600 Million Chinese (New York: Criterion Books, 1957), 18; William Stevenson, The Yellow Wind: An Excursion in and around Red China with a Traveler in the Yellow Wind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 108. Hong Zhong, ‘A Century of Chinese Printed Textiles’, in Breward and MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai, 21–44. ‘The Youthful Red Guards’, Union Research Service Reports [Hong Kong], 44/20 (1966), 298–320, here 298.

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itself gave way to an eternal revolutionary present that came to an end only with the death of Mao in 1976. Yet in these years foundations were laid for the production of fashion in the 1980s. The clothing industry in China in the 1960s and 1970s has some resonances with developments in the Soviet Union in the same period. Numerous organizations were dedicated to designing clothes, and thousands of people were employed in the task.105 In China, there were even fewer demands on the creativity of designers than in Russia, but from the Ministry of Light Industry down to individual clothing factories, staff in research offices (yanjiusuo) were engaged in drawing up clothing patterns and technical cutting and sewing guides for use by garment factories and home sewers.106 With the founding of the PRC, the entire clothing culture had shifted to a fitted clothing model: sleeves fitted rather than continuous, coats made to measure, trousers ‘Western’ and cut to shape, rather than being the same front and back. In this regime, patterns were necessary if the clothes were to be made. With some exceptions depending on the political climate,107 the range of garments for which patterns were drawn up was narrow, sometimes extending not much beyond the various styles of coat already mentioned, plus the centre-fastening dual-purpose jacket (liangyongshan) that was generally worn by women in China’s cities and towns.108 At the same time, brochures designed for foreign buyers show that there was an alertness to trends in the outside world. Pattern books constituted a genre of technological literature that barely existed before 1949. In the early 1950s, they were mostly

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Jukka Gronow and Sergey Zhuravlev, Fashion Meets Socialism: Fashion Industry in the Soviet Union after the Second World War (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2018), 92. Antonia Finnane, ‘Sewing Manuals in 1950s China: Socialist Narratives and Dress Patterns from New Democracy to Socialist Transformation’, in Anne Peirson-Smith and Joseph H. Hancock II (eds.), Transglobal Fashion Narratives: Clothing Communication, Style Statements and Brand Storytelling (London: Intellect Ltd, 2018), 115–36. A wider range of garments, and in particular more garments for women, can be found in publications of 1956, when there was a campaign to improve the dress of the people, and again in 1964, during a temporary retreat from the mass line. The term liangyongshan (dual purpose jacket or shirt) could also be used for a man’s garment but in practice was mostly associated with women’s styles.

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Figure 24.15 Pattern books from the Mao years occasionally showed Soviet influence, as in the Shenyang publication on the upper left. More common were patterns for how to economize on cloth or change old styles into new (lower left). During the Cultural Revolution, pattern books usually carried quotations from Chairman Mao on the cover (centre top and right). Very rarely, specialist publications on women’s styles were published (bottom centre). Author’s collection.

created by and for sewing schools run by private individuals. From the mid-1950s onward, they were typically produced by organs of government or state-owned enterprises (Figure 24.15). The quality of the manuals themselves improved over time, in terms of paper, printing, and layout. Some were issued by sewing machine factories, and included instructions on how to use and maintain a machine. Their distribution helped to disseminate skills in the mechanization of garment manufacture. The sewing machine industry itself grew from virtually nothing to a substantial industry with an export market.109 For political and policy reasons, there were limitations to the scope of development in all these fields. Light industry was consistently underfunded during the Mao years; the command economy combined with a model of regional self-sufficiency meant that

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Antonia Finnane, ‘Cold War Sewing Machines: Production and Consumption in 1950s China and Japan’, Journal of Asian Studies, 75/3 (2016), 755–83.

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supply could never keep up with demand; control of prices and wages meant a loss of skills in some sectors as workers and indeed local governments focused on more profitable areas of industry. Despite all these shortfalls, there was something to build on in the post-Mao years. In Changsha, unemployed Deng Xiaohua (b. 1953), stuck at home with an infant and dependent on her carpenter husband’s tiny income, taught herself to use a sewing machine and recruited her husband to draft clothing patterns: At that time we had two copies of Shanghai Garments Cutting and Drafting. That served as the mentor for all our sewing work. After three months’ striving, the first visitor arrived (introduced to us by someone we knew). Then came a second, a third . . . Our dreams were realized. We immediately began to earn money. Our hallmark was innovation in styles with fashion as a specialty, and making clothes suitable for the particular body shapes of the elderly.110

According to the writer, this business, launched in 1981, was among the earliest of the Reform Era ‘independent businesses’ (getihu) in Changsha. The Mao years had deprived her and her family of much, but they did produce the sewing machine and the pattern books. ‘We were in very high spirits’, she recalls of those days. ‘I was spurred on by hopes for the future.’111

the future In the 1980s, China was changing direction. ‘Conducting revolution to the end’ had given way to ‘reforming and opening up’. Criticisms of flares and short skirts were replaced by a cautious enthusiasm for modern, Western garments. The qipao made a tentative reappearance (Figure 24.16). Zengcheng, near Guangzhou, became the jeans capital of the world, jump-starting China’s ascent up the balance-of-trade graph. Fuelled by foreign investment and an apparently bottomless well of labour, China turned itself into a clothes factory for the West, and for much of 110

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Canxue 残雪, Quguang yundong – huisu tongnian de jingshen tujing 趋光运 动– 回溯童年的精神图景 [Movement Towards the Light – Revisiting Inner Scenes from Childhood] (Beijing: Beijing Chubanshe, 2017), 33–4. Ibid.

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Figure 24.16 Early 1980s studio photo of woman wearing a qipao. The ankle-high nylons were characteristic of the time. Author’s collection.

the rest of the world as well. Fashion magazines appeared, created more for the industry than for consumers, but novel and exciting compared to the pattern books of previous decades. The recruitment and training of models commenced. A fashion industry began to take shape. In Beijing, fifteen-year-old Ma Ling graduated from dancing school in the very year, 1984, that the Central Academy of Industrial Fine Arts established an independent fashion department. In 1987 she completed a degree in fashion design there and commenced work as a designer with the modelling troupe run by the Beijing Bureau of Textiles. In 1988 she established her own fashion and accessories company.112 Compared to even a decade earlier, the opportunities were dizzying. 112

‘Huizu zhuming yanyuan Ma Ling 回族著名演员马羚 [Ma Ling, Famous Performer of the Hui Minority]’, www.muslimwww.com/html/2013/rw_0210/ 12053.html (accessed 14 February 2021); Finnane, Changing Clothes, 269–70.

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Between the obviously lively fashion scene in the 1920s and 1930s and the nascent fashion industry of the 1980s lay the development of a technical education system. In the 1930s, there were no schools of fashion. Training was undertaken through an apprenticeship system. Sewing and dressmaking was taught in girls’ schools, vocational schools, and reformatories113 but the basic skills imparted in these institutions were not systematically linked to the production of fashion for advertising and retail. After 1949, a mix of private and Party initiatives in vocational education gave rise to a large number of sewing schools aimed at providing women with skills deployable in the labour force. In Beijing in 1954, more than 11,000 women went through short periods of instruction in the city’s twenty-four specialist sewing schools.114 Few of these schools lasted very long but they supplied basic training for the clothing factories that were established in the course of the 1950s. Equally important was the expansion of the general education system. Most of the leading fashion training centres in China today have roots in colleges set up in the Mao years. The Central Academy of Industrial Fine Arts is an example. Established in 1956, it is now part of Tsinghua University. Donghua University in Shanghai was established as Donghua Textiles College in 1951, under the Ministry of Textiles. It became a university in 1985, and established its first independent department of fashion in the same year.115 The Beijing College of Textile Technology was a product of the Great Leap Forward. Established in 1959, it was renamed the Beijing College of Chemical Fibres Engineering in 1961. In 1988 it was reinvented as the Beijing Institute of Fashion

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Elizabeth J. Remick, Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 192; Helen M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 134. Benju guanyu zhaokai sili buxuexiao gongzuo huiyi de tongzhi he xuexiao gezhong tongji baobiao 本局关于召开私立补学校工作会议的通知和学校各种 统计报表 [Working Meeting Convened by This Bureau on Private Tutoring Schools and Tabulation of Statistics of Each School], 19? October 1954. BJMA 152–001-00266. http://fzys.dhu.edu.cn/9753/list.htm (accessed 1 September 2020).

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Technology.116 In all these cases, consistent with a principle of ‘changing tracks’ articulated in 1984,117 educational institutions that had been geared towards technology and instrumentalist design in a productionist environment were reorientated towards trade and consumption. The biographies of pioneering designers of the 1980s show that other institutions, too, were changing tracks. In the 1980s Wang Xinyuan (b. 1958) graduated from the Suzhou Institute of Silk Science, Wu Haiyan (b. 1958) from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, and Frankie Xie (b. 1960) from the Zhejiang Institute of Silk Science. Guangdong province, at the frontline of Reform Era economic and social change, was producing its own future fashion industry stars: the audacious Liu Yang (b. 1969) graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, where a department of clothing design was first established in 1986.118 Designers might serendipitously appear from schools of no particular note. The now celebrated couturier Guo Pei (b. 1967) graduated in 1986 with a speciality in clothing design from Beijing’s No. 2 School of Light Industry, an institution famous mostly as her alma mater.119 As training in garment design turned towards education in fashion design, horizons of learning expanded. Hungry for knowledge, graduates flocked through the half-open door of ‘reform and opening up’ to gain work experience and further education in Hong Kong, Japan, the United States, and elsewhere. In 1987 Wang Xinyuan was sent to Hong Kong for training. There he won a prize at a local fashion contest, helping him build connections that underpinned the launch of his joint-venture label Yin Meng. In 1989, Frankie Xie was one of twenty Chinese students studying at Japan’s prestigious Bunka Fashion Academy.120 He went on to receive international recognition as the creator of the label Jefen. 116 117 118

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www.bift.edu.cn/xxgk/lsyg/index.htm (accessed 1 September 2020). Zhao, The Chinese Fashion Industry, 24. Biographies of and interviews with all these designers can be found in Tsui, China Fashion. On Guo, see Hazel Clark, ‘Chinese Fashion Designers: Becoming International’, in Wessie Ling and Simona Segre Reinach (eds.), Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 215–16. Tsui, China Fashion, 94–5.

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Japan was a major inspiration for 1980s designers, not least because of the great success of Japanese fashion designers in Paris in the early 1980s. Paris itself beckoned. Pierre Cardin, active in China from the beginning of the Reform Era, brought French models to China and took Chinese models to Paris. In 1985, a Chinese modelling troupe brought traffic to a halt on the Champs-Élysées. This turn towards the outside world was vividly apparent in the controversial documentary series River Elegy, televised nationwide in 1988. The series called for a reorientation from inland to coast, from autarky to connectedness, and in William Godby’s words, ‘opened a discursive space in which possibilities for the future might be considered’.121 In one respect, the call was answered: in the 1990s, the opening of ports on the coast to foreign investment and trade generated the phenomenon of xiahai – ‘heading for the coast’ – and ushered in a period of extraordinary economic growth. China became a leading exporter of apparel during this decade and by its end had overtaken Japan as an exporter of sewing machines. In the meantime, the past was being revisited. Re-engagement with the Republic of China was particularly noticeable. In 1980 Tang Xiaodan’s City without Night was screened for the first time, twenty-three years after filming had finished. Cinema audiences were treated via its opening segments to a view of how well-to-do people in Shanghai had dressed in the past: the men in Western suits with shirts and ties; the women in qipaos; the young girls in Western fashions. The actual city of Shanghai was dusted off, its largely intact heritage of Art Deco buildings providing a backdrop for the imminent re-emergence of a fashion industry (Figure 24.17). The more distant past, less politically sensitive, was more thoroughly excavated. In 1981, Shen Congwen, famed in the Republican period as a writer of short fiction, completed his monumental Research on Ancient Chinese Costume, laying the foundations for scholarly engagement with fashion history.122 There 121

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William C. Godby, ‘Televisual Discourse and the Mediation of Power: Living-Room Dialogues with Modernity in Reform-Era China’, in Randy Kluver and John H. Powers (eds.), Civic Discourse, Civil Society, and Chinese Communities (Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 1999), 130. Shen Congwen, Zhongguo gudai fushi yanjiu [Research on Ancient Chinese Costume] (Hong Kong: Shangwu yinshuguan Xianggang fenguan, 1992). For a thoughtful discussion of the book as history, see David Der-wei

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Figure 24.17 Sincere Department Store, built in 1916, was simply Shanghai Clothing Store in the Mao years, but had a new lease of life as Shanghai Fashion Store in the Reform Era. Photo by Xia Williams, 16 September 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20161015062417; www .panoramio.com/photo/31975229.

followed a spate of publications on the theme. Of these, some were translated works that introduced knowledge both of Japanese or European historical dress and of modes of teaching fashion history. Others were original works.123 In 1986, Luo Chongqi – forty-one years old, and with a work history in editing and translation – set off on a journey of discovery that took him all over the country in search of old shoes. The literary world at this time was caught up in a ‘search for roots’ (xungen).124 Luo may have been showing the effects. The result of his self-funded research was an exhibition in Shanghai in March 1989, followed by a pioneering history of the shoe in China, and the establishment of a shoe museum in Anhui,

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Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 102–12. See Bian Xiangyang 卞向阳, ‘Zhongguo fuzhuang shixue de qiyuan, xianzhuang he fazhan qushi 中国服装史学的起源、现状和发展趋势’ [Origins, Present Circumstances, and Trends in Chinese Fashion Historiography], Zhejiang gongcheng xueyuan xuebao 浙江工程学院学报, 4 (April 2001). Ming-yan Lai, Nativism and Modernity: Cultural Contestations in China and Taiwan under Global Capitalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 111ff.

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with Luo as director.125 Created well before the great proliferation of museums now evident in the People’s Republic of China, this may have been China’s first dedicated museum of apparel. While revisiting the past, China was beginning to recalibrate the present. In the world of textiles and apparel, this was evident in the publication of fashion magazines, ‘established by state-owned entities’ as Zhao Jianhua points out,126 but nonetheless doing the job of reckoning fashion time. Fashion time was very obviously not revolutionary time, but rather the seasonal and annual time of a production cycle geared to and driven by consumerism. In the Mao years, despite some lip service to ‘new styles’, it was not uncommon for the same collection of patterns to be reproduced year after year. After a gap of some decades, the rhythm of fashion was reestablished. If this was initially an urban and coastal phenomenon, it nonetheless set the pace for China’s economy, which in respect of exports was increasingly geared to servicing the appetites of foreign consumers for new clothes, and new styles of clothes.127 If export fluctuations show that the garment-making industry in China had problems in adjusting to the requirements of US women’s fashions, they also showed that these problems could be overcome.128 The 1980s ended badly for China. In a 2009 interview, fashion historian Yuan Ze, professor at the Beijing Fashion Institute of Technology, commented elliptically that ‘at the end of the eighties, not much was happening in the development of the garment 125

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Luo Chongqi 骆崇骐, Zhongguo xie wenhua shi 中国鞋文化史 [Cultural History of Shoes in China] (Shanghai: Shanghai Kexue Jishu Chubanshe, 1990), 2. Zhao, The Chinese Fashion Industry, 50. For a list of early Reform Era fashion magazines, see Antonia Finnane, ‘China on the Catwalk: Between Economic Success and Nationalist Anxiety’, The China Quarterly, 183 (September 2005), 597. See Yongzheng Yang and Chuanshui Yong, China’s Textile and Clothing Exports in a Changing World Economy (Canberra: National Centre for Development Studies, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU, 1996), who note (p. 2) that China’s textile and apparel exports increased eightfold between 1980 and 1994. Joseph Pelzer, ‘PRC Textile Trade and Investment: Impact of the U.S.–PRC Bilateral Textile Agreements’, in Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, China’s Economy Looks toward the Year 2000, Volume 2: Economic Openness in Modernizing China (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1986), 403.

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industry’.129 Between April and June of 1989, news reports on televisions around the world showed thousands of young people gathered in Tiananmen Square. They began arriving in spring and the numbers swelled in early summer. The weather changed from mild to fine and warm. The students took off their zipper jackets. They went into battle wearing short-sleeved button-up shirts, or knit shirts with turndown collars. Among the young men, some were wearing shorts, which during the Mao years were rarely seen except on the sports field. Among the young women, some wore skirts. It was not a fashion parade, but en masse they showed a changing material culture that was more or less contiguous with that of the outside world. Since factories in China were increasingly supplying the clothes of people abroad as well as at home, the commonalities are not surprising.130 Culturally this was a period of transition. Literary scholar Kun Qian sees the 1980s and 1990s as ‘a synthetic time that contains multiple temporalities’.131 In the wake of the disaster of the Tiananmen protests, the imminent return of Hong Kong to mainland sovereignty provided the Chinese government with a much-needed focus for patriotism. A turn towards Asia in the early 1990s was expressed in a growing engagement with regional fashion scenes: Japan, Hong Kong, and increasingly Korea. Domestically, there was an outpouring of cultural products about imperial China. Costume dramas, historical fiction and popular histories fostered the imagination of dynastic China as many-splendoured and world-significant. An emerging ‘empire complex’, to use Qian’s term, fostered the development of fashion with Chinese characteristics.132

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‘Zhuanjia tan fuzhuang chanye gaige kaifang sanshinian fazhanshi 专家谈服 装产业改革开放 30 年发展史 [An Expert Talks about the History of the Development of the Clothing Industry over the Thirty Years of the Reform and Opening Up]’, www.p5w.net/zt/dissertation/finance/200909/t 2556756.htm, 8 September 2009 (accessed 14 February 2021). Alan Taylor, ‘Photos: The 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests’, The Atlantic, 4 June 2014, www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/06/1989-tiananmen-squareprotests-photos/100751/ (accessed 14 February 2021). Kun Qian, Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 185. ‘Zhongguo nannü fuzhuang de “guocui” 中国男女服装的 ‘国粹 [National Essence in Men’s and Women’s Clothing in China]’, Jishu jiandu hengzong 技术监督横纵, 15 September 1999, 40.

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Future couturier Guo Pei was maturing as a designer at this time. In 1996, Takahata Maki, a journalist with Asahi Shimbun, identified Guo and collaborator Sun Jian as the bright hope of Chinese fashion. She was particularly struck by Guo’s open-work knits paired with figure-hugging trousers, and Sun’s power suits.133 In a documentary made around this time, Guo Pei expresses exactly the complex of challenges and problems felt across the fashion sector at that time. She wanted to make it internationally, but also to be meaningful in China; to design in a modern way, yet to convey a sense of Chinese design.134 This journey eventually took her a long way from the symphony of black and grey evident in her 1996 work. Turning to the vast reserve of Chinese visual culture, while continuing to engage with European garment design, she eventually produced a grand oeuvre that would combine local traditions of needlework and design elements from deep within the Chinese past (Figure 24.18).

conclusion Looking back, it can be seen that the fashion history of twentiethcentury China features a series of epistemes, demarcated primarily by the profound ruptures represented by regime change. The established clothing system, with its handwoven cloth and long robes was transformed in the first half of the century, as ideas of the body were reconfigured, limbs were exposed, and machine-woven or knitted materials were popularized. Urban society was reconfigured as cities were physically transformed. Women emerged from ‘within’ to participate in the new economy and society. There was a flow of people, ideas, money, and goods in and out of the coastal ports, and from there along the waterways to the great cities of the interior. Somewhere in the course of the 1920s and 1930s, as remarked by Zhang Ailing’s mentor Xu Dishan, ‘the fashion era

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Takahita Maki 竹端真树, ‘Shizhuang shu yu shui? 时装属于谁? [To Whom Does Fashion Belong?]’, trans. Li Xiaomu 李小牧, Shizhuang 时装, 67 (15 July 1996), 14–15. The two designers are the focus of a documentary filmed around this time. Sally Ingleton, Mao’s New Suit (Singing Nomad Productions, 1999).

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Figure 24.18 Exhibit by haute couturier Guo Pei (detail), showing the densely ornamental embroidery that is a characteristic of her oeuvre. China Through the Looking Glass exhibition, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 7 May– 7 September 2015. www.flickr.com/photos/xiivii/20347140236/

unexpectedly arrived’.135 Its progress can be, and was, followed by tracking the qipao, a practice revived at the other end of the century as if in homage to the beginnings of a fashion system in China.136 The second and third quarters of the twentieth century, dominated by the figures of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, were pivotal periods of Chinese history. In sartorial terms, as in many others, the difference between the two regimes, Nationalist and 135

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Xu Dishan 许地山, ‘Jin sanbainianlai di Zhongguo nüzhuang 近三百年来底中 国女装 [Chinese Women’s Clothing in the Last Three Hundred Years]’, Shucheng 书城, 5 November 1935, https://zi5.net/book/chapter/47981/76 .html (accessed 25 April 2020). Hua Mei 华梅, ‘Shizhuang de liusu he zhouqi 时装的流速和周期 [Fashion Flows, Fashion Periods]’, Shizhuang 时装, 15 July 1996.

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Communist, was profound. The Communist Revolution destroyed the sort of clothing worn by townspeople through the first half of the twentieth century. In periods of political thaw during the Mao years, the qipao very occasionally made an appearance, but the long gown was definitively removed from the sartorial landscape. It disappeared not only from people’s backs but also from the horizon of design. Chinese clothing was not completely destroyed: in the countryside, and as winter wear, Chinese-style jackets continued to be worn, particularly by women. Nonetheless, the long-term effect of the Mao years was to establish Western-style tailoring as the norm for clothing construction. Not even the hanfu movement could repair the rupture. In the 1980s, the limitations of the campaign to eliminate the ‘old habits’ quickly became apparent. The Maoist revolution had failed to eradicate the entrepreneurial spirit, and private commerce quickly flourished again. To Yuan Ze’s memory, every petty entrepreneur was soon doing a sideline in the new styles of clothing that long-distance peddlers were distributing from their point of origin in Guangdong.137 In a historically significant series of interviews, Christine Tsui has documented the experience of the first generation of Reform Era designers, whose first intimate encounters with modern world fashions were no doubt these very peddled items.138 This generation, writes Tsui, constituted the ‘paving stones’ for the future.139 Even if nothing much was happening in the late 1980s, the founding of the CFA in 1993 shows that the basic infrastructure for a fashion industry was already in gestation.140 No doubt there is also something to be said for the characterization of this generation as ‘born at the wrong time’.141 To the extent that fashion functions, in Benjamin’s words, as ‘camouflage for quite specific interests of the ruling class’,142 China’s fashion 137 138 139

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‘Zhuanjia tan fuzhuang chanye gaofe kaifang sanshinian fazhanshi’. Tsui, China Fashion. Christine Tsui, ‘Weihe diyidai Zhongguo shejishi “sheng bu feng shi”? 为何 第一代中国设计师 “生不逢时”? [Why Was the First Generation of Chinese Designers “Born in the Wrong Time”?]’, Business of Fashion, 11 March 2016, www.zhihu.com/column/p/21312154 (accessed 12 February 2021). Zhao, The Chinese Fashion Industry, 113. Tsui, ‘Weihe diyidai Zhongguo shejishi “sheng bu feng shi”?’ Benjamin, Style and Time, 26.

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industry in the 1980s could be said to have been in search of a new ruling class. That quest effectively ended with the CFA’s formation. As noted in the opening pages of this chapter, the CFA is formally committed to the support of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1997, it presided over the first China Fashion Week, a modest event that nonetheless signalled national ambitions to perform with style on the world stage in the century to come. Naturally, fashion weeks signal a commitment to a certain sort of time. Sixty years earlier, Changyan’s cartoon of changes in the qipao had shown the internalization of fashion time in the domestic market for textiles and apparel (Figure 24.1). Already at that time, the articulation with international fashion time was clear. Hairstyles, hems, accessories, all show the interplay between local and world trends. In the Mao years, the opportunities for such interplay were limited, and fashion ceased to mark the passage of time in any meaningful way. In these same years, Fashion Week became an international phenomenon. With the launch of its own fashion weeks, post-Mao China fell into temporal step with a global business cycle that had altered almost beyond recognition since the 1930s. If the fashions, too, had altered greatly, elements in the developing fashion industry of the Reform Era show the formational effects of that earlier time. In 2001, the New Silk Route Modelling Company mounted an exhibition in Berlin that showed the changes in Chinese dress over a period of two millennia from the Han to Qing dynasties.143 Someone of great age might have been able to recall a similar exhibition, an event organized by the combined YMCA and YWCA in the Embassy Theatre in Bubbling Well Road one winter’s night in 1926 (Figure 24.19). Combining ‘an ancient pageant and a show of the latest styles’, this was among the earliest of fashion parades in China.144 Much as in Zhang Ailing’s 1943 essay, it distinguished between the dynamism of the present and the splendours of a temporally muddled past. Yet with its line-up of mannequins in 143

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‘Zhongguo fuzhuang zoujin Bolin 中国服装走进柏林 [China Fashion Show in Berlin]’, Zhongguo zhi yi 中国之衣, 12 (December 2001), 70–4. Agnes Fung, ‘The Chinese Fashion Show’, North China Herald, 18 December 1926. The Chinese press carried a different level of detail, and photos. See Baoen, ‘Zuoye shizhuang biaoxianhui suji’.

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Figure 24.19 The 1926 fashion show. Sketch by Roberta Patterson, North China Daily News (18 December 1926), 14.

historical costume, it anticipated the more developed chronology that was to be imposed on historical dress within China’s evolving fashion system in the following century.

glossary ao 袄 chang majia 长马甲 changpao magua 长袍马褂

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Changyan 昌炎 Chen Yingxia 陈映霞 (1896–1966) chengyipu 成衣铺 chenyi 衬衣 chuanxie 船鞋 da kanjian 大坎肩 dalasu 耷拉苏 Deng Xiaohua 邓小华 (b. 1953) getihu 个体户 guapimao 瓜皮帽 Guo Pei 郭培 (b. 1967) hanfu 汉服 Hongxiang 鸿翔 Hu Shi 胡适 (1891–1962) huapenxie 花盆鞋 Jing Yufeng 景玉峰 (fl. 1910s) Lan Yu 兰玉 (b. 1986) laosan 老三 Li Binsheng 李滨声 (b. 1925) liangbatou 两把头 liangyongshan 两用衫 Libao 立报 Liu Cuixian 刘翠仙 (b. c. 1900) Liu Yang 刘杨 (b. 1969) liuhai 刘海 Lu Xiaoman 陆小曼 (1903–65) Ma Ling 马零 (b. 1969) Ma Xiuying 马秀英 (fl. 1920s) majia 马甲 matixie 马蹄鞋 mingji 名妓 mingyuan 名媛 pao 袍 qi 旗 qi ren 旗人 qipao 旗袍 Shen Congwen 沈从文 (1902–88) Shi Huizhen 施惠珍 (1906~2004)

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shimao 时髦 shiyang 时样 Song Meiling 宋美龄 (1898–2003) Sun Jian 孙俭 Tang Xiaodan 汤晓丹 (1910–2012) Tang Ying 唐英 (1910–1986) Wang Xinyuan 王新元 (b. 1958) Wu Haiyan 吴海燕 (b. 1958) xiahai 下海 Xiao Baolian 萧宝莲 (1909~84) xiaobanbi 小半臂 xiaoshan小衫 Xie, Frankie (Xie Feng) 谢锋 (b. 1960) Xu Dishan 许地山 (1893–1941) Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897–1931) yanjiusuo 研究所 yikouzhong 一口钟 Yuan Ze 袁仄 Yufei 浴非 Yunshang 云裳 Zhang Ailing 张爱玲 (1920–95) Zhang Youyi 张幼仪 (1900–1988) Zhongshan 中山装

select bibliography Anjo, Hissako and Antonia Finnane, ‘Tailoring in China and Japan: Cultural Transfer and Cutting Techniques in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 263–88. Bian Xiangyang and Yan Lanlan, ‘Shanghai Qipao, 1925–1949’, in Christopher Breward and Juliette MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 67–86. Chang, Eileen [Zhang Ailing], ‘A Chronicle of Changing Clothes’, trans. Andrew E. Jones, positions: east asia cultures critique, 11/2 (Fall 2003), 427–41. Chen, Tina Mai, ‘Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender-Formation in Mao’s China’, Fashion Theory, 1/3 (2001), 333–60.

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fashion and time in china’s twentieth century Clark, Hazel, ‘Chinese Fashion Designers: Becoming International’, in Wessie Ling and Simona Segre Reinach (eds.), Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 199–220. Finnane, Antonia, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Harrison, Henrietta, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China 1911–1929 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Ingleton, Sally, Mao’s New Suit (Singing Nomad Productions, 1999). Kwong, Luke S. K., ‘The Rise of the Linear Perspective on History and Time in Late Qing China c. 1860–1911’, Past & Present, 173 (November 2001), 157–90. Lee, S. Heijin, Christina H. Moon, and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu (eds.), Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia (New York: New York University Press, 2019). Qian, Kun, Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Tsui, Christine, China Fashion: Conversations with Designers (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2009). Wu, Juanjuan, Chinese Fashion from Mao to Now (Oxford: Berg, 2009). Yang, Chia-ling, ‘Image Makers of Fashionable Shanghai, 1910–1930’, in Christopher Breward and Juliette MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 147–80. Zhao, Jianhua, The Chinese Fashion Industry: An Ethnographic Approach (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AND FASHION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY djurdja bartlett

introduction This chapter focuses on the three phenomena of socialist fashion – socialist official fashion, everyday fashion, and alternative fashion – and argues that they were embedded in different spheres of socialist societies and served by different concepts of time. The initial Bolshevik attempts at utopia in the early 1920s had rejected fashion. It belonged to the past, and not to the new, rationalized and ordered world that the early Bolsheviks were attempting to build. But fashion received official approval in the Stalinist Soviet Union from the mid-1930s on. Born in the central dress institution, House of Prototypes in Moscow, socialist fashion developed within a highly centralized system and its Five-Year Plans. These were introduced as a part of the Stalinist industrialization drive, designed to raise technical and organizational levels of the backward Russian textile and clothing industries. As the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, the countries in the region nationalized their textile and clothing industries, and central dress institutions were set up to coordinate the activities of those industries and to design new clothing. Inevitably, the hierarchical levels of decision-making caused delays in promoting new styles, and, also, diluted their quality. Yet, as a modernist phenomenon par excellence, fashion disturbed the socialist system throughout its existence. Moreover,

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its uneven temporal and geographical advance pointed towards the varied political and cultural modernization projects in the respective countries. The relationship between the desire for modern clothes and the conceptual order had a different dynamic in the more isolated Soviet Union than in the socialist, yet more open Eastern and Central Europe. In general, while the production of mass clothing remained insufficient throughout the socialist period, the 1960s marked the appearance of flagship department stores offering better-quality clothes. Equally, ‘do-it-yourself’ practices allowed for some differentiation, such as an individual play with colour or use of an unusual fabric, which characterized everyday fashion. Alternative ways of designing, producing, and wearing clothes developed in the 1980s as the socialist system increasingly deteriorated in the Soviet Union and Central East European countries. In order to explore these three characteristics of fashion under socialism – socialist official fashion, everyday fashion, and alternative fashion – in their economic, social, and cultural context, the chapter considers state ownership, central planning and production, central fashion institutions, do-it-yourself practices, and various modes of consumption within a controlled market.

socialist official fashion: the soviet union, 1920s–1930s Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, fashion was perceived as an endeavour embedded in the messy everyday, tainted with its connections to commerce and to inappropriate desires and pleasures, which could only lead to irrational consumption.1 In early 1920s Russia, the Constructivists embodied Bolshevik anxieties concerning dress as a carrier of status and gender differences. Relying on the aesthetics of utopian abstractionism, they 1

For an overview of the history of various guises of socialist fashion, from 1917 through to the end of socialism, in both the Soviet Union and five other exsocialist countries – East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia – see Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). This chapter, however, does not deal with the socialist fashion system in Yugoslavia, as in many ways it differed from the centralized model.

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envisioned a total change in dress, advocating functionality, modesty, and simple geometrical lines. While such initial attempts at utopia had rejected fashion, it received official approval in the Stalinist Soviet Union from the early1930s on. The phenomenon of socialist official fashion developed within a highly centralized system and its Five-Year Plans, which were introduced as a part of the Stalinist industrialization drive, designed to raise the technical and organizational levels of the backward Russian textile and clothing industries. Thus, in contrast to Western fashion, which operated in the field of commerce in which privately owned companies competed for their slice of the market by launching ever-new trends each season, socialist fashion was informed by state ownership, central planning, and a limited market.2 In 1935, the physical existence of socialist fashion was officially confirmed with the opening of the Dom modelei (House of Prototypes) in Moscow.3 The established fashion designer Nadezhda Makarova (1898–1969), who started her career under the well-known pre-revolutionary designer Nadezhda Lamanova’s (1861–1941) guidance, was its first director, while Lamanova was appointed as its artistic consultant.4 So, in contrast to the Constructivists such as Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), who had encouraged change but did not allow space for fashion, Stalinism released a space for socialist fashion with the opening of the Dom modelei, but stopped short of change by insisting on the concept of timelessness in dress. However, the ideological imposition of conventionally elegant, feminine dress took place amidst the terrible deprivations of everyday life that accompanied 2

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For an overview, see, for example, Janos Kornai, Vision and Reality, Market and State: Contradictions and Dilemmas Revisited (Budapest: Corvina, 1990). ‘Dom modelei’ is often translated as ‘House of Fashion’, but a more accurate translation, ‘House of Prototypes’, already points to its main task: to design and produce prototypes of dresses, to be, ideally, reproduced into mass clothing in textile factories all over the country. Nadezhda Lamanova opened her fashion salon in Moscow in 1885. By the 1910s, she employed twenty seamstresses, supplying haute couture dresses to her rich and sophisticated clientele which included gentry and famous actresses. Her fashion house was nationalized in the aftermath of the Revolution, but, unlike other pre-revolutionary fashion designers, Lamanova offered her superb expertise on dressmaking to the Bolsheviks.

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Soviet industrialization. Stalinism translated the difficult Soviet reality into an ideal mythical image which was disconnected from the hardships of everyday life. The cultural historian Sheila Fitzpatrick recognized two Stalinist realities as ‘life as it is’ and ‘life as it is becoming’.5 Equally, as the birth of socialist fashion was not disturbed by real-life changes, this specific socialist sartorial idiom was informed neither by fashion trends nor the laws of the market. Strongly promoted through illustration and fashion magazines, films, newsreels, and theatre, it developed into a timeless, luxurious, and unique phenomenon of its own (Figure 25.1). Socialist official fashion was characterized by pastiche aesthetics and by selective borrowing from both the most traditional expressions of Western opulence and the Russian ethnic heritage. It abandoned the Constructivist modernist geometry and embraced the paradigms of Socialist Realism, which became the official aesthetic method once the modernist experiments were abandoned.6 The official brief to the artists was to aestheticize the existing reality according to the laws of beauty and harmony. Moreover, as observed by Evgeny Dobrenko, Socialist Realism was not a mere aesthetics but a machine for the production of socialism: Socialist Realism is a highly aestheticized culture, a radically transformed world . . . Aesthetics did not beautify reality, it was reality. By contrast, all reality outside of Socialist Realism was but the wilderness of everyday life, waiting to be rendered fit to be read and interpreted . . . ‘Hiding’ or ‘glossing over’ truth, portraying it through representative types, ‘romanticizing’ it, and the like are merely mechanisms of aestheticization. To aestheticize is to recreate the world, to transform it according to the laws of beauty and harmony.7

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Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 219–27. Socialist Realism was initially advocated by a Stalinist ideologue, Andrei Zhdanov, at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, and subsequently introduced as the official aesthetics. Evgeny Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 4.

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Figure 25.1 The luxury of socialist official fashion: Modeli sezona (Fashions of the Seasons). Modeli sezona, Moscow, no. 4, 1938–9, cover.

Fully embedded in the Stalinist myth, the prototypes of elegant and timeless dresses designed and sewn at the Dom modelei fulfilled a highly representational role that Stalinism granted to fashion.8 This system cunningly embedded its mythical culture into an equally ideologized scientific framework. A new professional 8

All the names, from designers to cutters, sample makers, and the members of the Artistic Board, were listed in the editorial of the first issue of the journal Dom modelei (Moscow, 1936), in order to demonstrate the importance of the new institution and the new role of fashion at the time.

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magazine, Shveinaia promyshlennost’ (Clothing Industry), appeared in 1929, and throughout the 1930s published numerous discussions and advice on the techniques of impeccable cut and perfect execution of outfits in order to enable Soviet industry to produce its own timeless classics. Ideally – copied from the West and flawlessly mastered in all their complex technical details – such clothes were supposed to protect socialist fashion from future changes. Offering potential solutions concerning the industrialization of clothing manufacture, Shveinaia promyshlennost’ invariably favoured the scientific approach to the problems of industrial dress production, while ignoring fashionable and artistic dress. Its early promoter was perceptual psychologist Sofia BeliaevaEkzempliarskaia (1895–1973) who, at the beginning of the 1930s, published a series of articles on the rational application of colour in clothing.9 Her manual on Dress Design According to the Laws of Visual Perception (1934) analysed various theories of form and their application to dress in a serious scientific manner. The unquestionable reliance on science in both utopianism and totalitarianism rested, as Frédéric Rouvillois has observed, on the ideal of perfection: Perfection constitutes the very essence of the utopian project: it is to be an acquired perfection that can be always improved upon and must be defended at all times to ensure its longevity, eternity being the principal corollary of perfection. Totalitarian doctrines follow suit: they too want to put an end to adversity, and to history . . . Totalitarianism, like utopia, purports to have triumphed over the anguish of time and the accidents of history.10

In its approach to science, Stalinism endorsed the earlier Constructivist fascination with technology. Yet, while in the utopian Bolshevik vision science served ethical and social ideals, in the Stalinist world science symbolized industrial and homogenized progress. By enrolling science in its service, Stalinism was not only 9

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The articles were published in Shveinaia promyshlennost’, 1932: 4–5, 42–8; 6–7, 5–10; 8–9, 4–13; 8–9, 24–36. Frédéric Rouvillois, ‘Utopia and Totalitarianism’, in R. Schaer, G. Claeys, and L. Tower Sargent (eds.), Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (New York and Oxford: The New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 2000), 316–31, at 322.

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interested in physically triumphing over the reality that it itself was so rapidly producing, but also in symbolically separating the process of production from its preferred final products. The former belonged to the gruelling everyday while a number of selected products, such as splendid dress prototypes, were promptly transferred to the Stalinist mythical reality and widely promoted through the mass media. Additionally, this manifestation of science was emphasized over the supposed irrationality of Western fashion. Embellished with Russian ethnic motifs, socialist fashion reintroduced opulence, decoration, and femininity, which held a wide appeal for the masses. Although it copied technically superior cuts and a traditional concept of luxury from the West,11 socialist official fashion aesthetically distanced itself from its Western counterpart precisely by its frequent ethnic quotations. Writing in 1937 on the initial results of the Dom modelei, one of its designers, Anna Blank, advocated that the Soviet style in dress should be achieved by exploring museum ethnic dress collections, by visiting related exhibitions, as well as by examining relevant literature in order to grasp cuts, colours, and embroideries as expressed in the national cultures of the peoples inhabiting the Soviet Union.12 But socialist fashion adopted yet another relevant paradigm of Socialist Realism: its appreciation of the classical. Turning away from fashionability, socialist fashion embarked on its search for an eternal style. This trend likewise started in the mid-1930s. The cover of the first issue of Dom modelei, published in 1936, shrank the Stalinist grandiose aesthetic from its monumental architectural forms into a small drawing showing a group of women in ancient Greek-style robes sewing clothes, trying out their shapes on each other, and arranging them on a tailor’s dummy. This search for classic forms related to the aesthetics of Socialist Realism and its fascination with the heritage of classical aesthetics. As Leonid 11

12

For example, in 1938 the Leningrad fashion journal Modeli plat’ia (Models of Dresses) reproduced its fashion drawings from the professional French tailors’ journals Le Tailleur de Luxe, Costumes Manteaux, and Le Grand Tailleur. Anna Blank, ‘Nekotorye itogi raboty Doma modelei’ [Some Results from the Activity of the Dom Modelei], Shveinaia promyshlennost’, 4 (1937), 28–30, at 29.

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Heller stated: ‘the very idea of a classic depends on classification, on judgments of normativity, on categorization – thus was the doctrine of Socialist Realism formulated through debates about norms and categories’.13 All these concepts – the frequent uses of the ethnic as a socialist attempt at an original aesthetic, the striving towards the classic and the perfect, the preference for the scientific over the fashionable – were introduced in Dom modelei in the mid-1930s and continued to inform Soviet dress design for decades. Equally, an ideal dress that would fulfil all these criteria was already produced in its design studio but only as a perfect prototype. In its first issue, Dom modelei claimed that a new institution had already designed 4,297 original outfits between October 1935 and July 1936, and that these prototypes were being reproduced as mass clothing in textile factories from Moscow to Ukraine, Byelorussia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.14 According to Anna Blank, making highly sophisticated samples of dresses to be consequently mass-produced by textile factories was indeed the main task of Dom modelei from its very beginning.15 However, the newly mechanized industry, still struggling with weak organization, a meagre supply of raw materials, and the low quality of fabrics, could not live up to the ideals imposed by the Stalinist myth. Already in 1937, T. Frolova from the Dress Laboratory of the Factory No. 1 within the Mosbel’e Trust,16 argued that the beautiful prototypes which arrived from the Dom modelei could not be massproduced, claiming, among other things, that their cuts were too complicated and that their production would incur a huge waste of fabric.17 She suggested that the designers from the Dom modelei should get closer to production and learn about its possibilities and

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Leonid Heller, ‘A World of Prettiness’, in T. Lahusen and E. Dobrenko (eds.), Socialist Realism without Shores (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 51–75, at 55. Editorial in the journal Dom modelei, Moscow, 1 (1936). Blank, ‘Nekotorye itogi raboty Doma modelei’, 28. All Russian textile and clothing firms were nationalized by decree in 1918 and organized in ten trusts. T. Frolova, ‘Dom modelei priblizit’ k proizvodstvu’ [Dom modelei Should Connect to the Production], Shveinaia promyshlennost’, 4 (1937), 30–1.

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requirements.18 Journals such as Modeli sezona (Fashions of the Seasons) were crucial in the promotion of socialist official fashion, which was started in the late 1930s in order to present dresses designed by the then newly founded Dom modelei. Already in the 1930s, Modeli sezona strongly relied on the art of fashion drawing. Its illustrations of sumptuous evening dresses barely differed from the outfits designed by the leading 1930s Hollywood designer Adrian.19 In general, Stalinist culture was expressed through film, musicals, fashion, and new mass magazines. The move from the paradigms of the so-called high culture to the paradigms of the socalled low culture happened because Stalinism wanted to engage the masses in its project. While indeed holding a wide appeal for the masses, mythical objects – whether they were presented in the pages of magazines or materialized as smart prototypes at exhibitions or on cinema screens – suited the increasingly centralized and bureaucratized industrial systems. As Roland Barthes emphasized, ‘it [is] necessary to distinguish in clothes between the synchronic or systematic level and the diachronic or processive level. Once again, as with language, the major problem here is that of putting together, in a truly dialectical snapshot, the link between the system and process.’20 While the Bolsheviks insisted on change, socialist official fashion – embedded in the Stalinist myth – preferred the synchronic, systematic level over the diachronic, processive level. In the end, the concept and practice of a sartorial prototype suited not only the overcentralized socialist economies, but also an ontological fear of change within a slow socialist master narrative. In that context, a sartorial prototype turned into a paradoxical example of frozen fashion. In the end, Stalinist fashion from the Moscow Dom 18

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Ibid. Pointing towards the disjunction between the central Dom modelei and the dress laboratories within textile factories, Frolova’s article was published as a critical response to Anna Blank’s praise of the activities of the Dom modelei, in the same issue of Shveinaia promyshlennost’. The role of the films produced during the Stalinist era, and their most famous star, Liubov’ Orlova, was to embellish the everyday through the costumes fitting a new, home-grown Soviet glamour. For an overview on Soviet film costumes in the 1920s–1930s, see Djurdja Bartlett, ‘Stars on Screen and Red Carpet’, in B. Beumers (ed.), A Companion to Russian Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 337–63. Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 10–11.

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modelei shared not only its aesthetics but also its ontological status with Socialist Realism. Stalinist myth also encompassed an elegant and feminine Super Woman who moreover was a dedicated worker. Within Stalinist mass culture, elegance and femininity became desirable gender categories that were owned by those who deserved them, such as the praised shock workers. Soon, they were joined by state artists and scientists, technical experts and loyal intellectuals, who formed the Stalinist elite, known as the Nomenklatura (Figure 25.2).21

socialist official fashion: central east europe, late 1940s–mid-1950s The Central East European states depended, both politically and ideologically, on their Soviet masters, following the Communist take-overs in 1948. In the field of fashion, their main role was to create an empty space for the advancing Stalinist mythical culture.22 This task was just one of many, which these states had been forced to undertake in order to denigrate their pre-Second World War capitalist cultures. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution announced a clear break with the past. Furthermore, the Soviet Union had already lived under Stalin for two decades and adopted the paradigms of the Stalinist mythical culture by the end of the 21

22

For an overview of the social stratification of Stalinist society and the privileges that it introduced for some, including custom-made dresses and access to other scarce goods, see Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). For the Soviet most privileged social strata, Nomenklatura, see Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class (London: Bodley Head, 1984). The shock workers, called also the Stakhanovites, acquired their name from the coalminer Aleksei Stakhanov, who over-fulfilled his work quota by 1,400 per cent on 30 August 1935. ‘Shock work’ existed before, but Stakhanovism differed in material stimuli, as it was accompanied by the public promotion of consumer values. On the politics of post-war Europe from the end of the Second World War onward, see, for example, Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2005). Concerning fashion, the concept of utopian dress had been promoted during the immediate post-war period but was soon replaced by the Stalinist-imposed phenomenon of socialist official fashion.

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Figure 25.2

The Nomenklatura goods. Catalogue, the Leningrad Rot Front Fur Company, 1936–7.

Second World War. Equally important, Stalin had introduced the centralized economic system of the Five-Year Plans to facilitate the process of industrialization in the Soviet Union, which was still a largely undeveloped country in the late 1920s. In contrast, this sudden rejection of all the previous culture, and the ways of producing it, was shocking in Central East Europe, as those countries had had a capitalist system before the start of the Second World War. Although their textile and clothing industries had been destroyed during the war, those countries had wellestablished pre-war sartorial traditions.

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As Stalin tightened his grip, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland nationalized their textile and clothing industries and the pre-war fashion salons. Subsequently, dress institutions, based on the Moscow Dom modelei, were set up to coordinate the activities of clothing industries and design. The adoption of the Soviet model negated the pre-existing domestic structure of fashion production as well as the previous history of fashion, and the newly established central fashion institutions became instruments of planned economies. The first of these institutions, Tekstilní Tvorba (Textile Production), was established in Czechoslovakia in 1949 by a decree of the Minister of Light Industry.23 The Hungarian central dress institution Ruhaipari Tervező Vállalat (Central Design Company for the Garment Industry, RTV) was established in 1951 through a merger of the Laboratory for Workers’ Uniforms and the Fashion Centre which had gathered pre-war fashion designers following the nationalization of the private fashion salons. Since industry was nationalized, and most of the previous owners had fled or perished in the war, new inexperienced but politically loyal managers took their places in the factories. However, in choosing collaborators to design new apparel, the regimes had little choice but to employ pre-war designers in their newly founded central dress institutions. In Czechoslovakia, one of these was Zdeň ka Fuchsová (1903–88), who, as a pre-war fashion designer from the leading Prague fashion salon Rosenbaum, had made regular visits to Paris in the interwar years. Thus, her technical expertise was a valuable asset for the newly founded central fashion institution Tekstilní Tvorba. The designs from the Czech central fashion institution were promptly published in the new fashion journal Žena a móda (Woman and Fashion) (Figure 25.3).24 In Poland, the socialist regime engaged Jadwiga Grabowska (1898–1988), who was born into a family of wealthy architects 23

24

For the development of post-Second World War Czech fashion, see also Konstantina Hlaváč ková, Czech Fashion 1940–1970: Mirror of the Times (Prague: u(p)m and Olympia Publishing, 2000). For an overview of the leading fashion salons in the First Czech Republic in the interwar period, see Eva Uchalová (ed.), Prague Fashion Houses, 1900– 1948 (Prague: Museum of Decorative Arts, 2011).

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Figure 25.3

Conventional elegance: Nõk lapja (Women’s Journal), Budapest, no. 21, 1952, back cover.

and wore couture in the pre-war period. She opened her own fashion salon, Feniks, in the centre of Warsaw at the end of the war but was forced to close it and subsequently was co-opted into the Bureau for Fashion Presentation at the Leipzig Fair. At this post, Grabowska became involved in designing collections for this important socialist international fair. Founded in December 1952, the East German Institut für Bekleidungskultur (Institute for the Culture of Dress, IBK) promoted representational dress from its very beginning. Its director Elli Schmidt announced in the fashion magazine Die Bekleidung (Clothing), that the IBK had the same role as its counterparts: to design and transfer new garment

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proposals to industry and to coordinate the mass production of clothing and fashion accessories.25 However, the regime was satisfied that the IBK produced haute couture-style prototypes, published their images in the fashion magazines, and paraded them at prominent events. This suited East Germany, which sought an alternative, representational reality with which to oppose the increasing West German advantage in everyday lifestyles. Schmidt had been a seamstress before the war, and the Party relied on her political loyalty in her new public role. She promptly adopted a discourse that neglected the East German reality, burdened as it was with shortages, and emphasized instead a bright socialist future, materialized in exquisite prototypes. In 1954, Schmidt presented IBK: ‘as the real House of Fashion in DDR . . . which would be a true joy for our people who live in our country of workers and peasants’.26 Annual dress contests between the socialist countries started in 1950 and were meant to establish a socialist style that would be functional, but modestly feminine and fashionable. The initial idea for dress contests was born in Czechoslovakia, the natural leader in the field of clothing due to its highly developed pre-war traditions. Only Czechoslovakia and East Germany took part in the first two annual dress contests and, with a presentation organized by Tekstilní Tvorba, Czechoslovakia won on both occasions, presenting an especially superior fashion show at the second contest held in Leipzig in 1951.27 In order to join the events, the Hungarian Ministry of Light Industry established a permanent working group within its central dress institution RTV in 1952 to organize its presentations at the contests. Žena a móda praised the Czech outfits for their ‘balance between elegance and purposefulness’, and their style of ‘practical elegance’,28 but the images that 25

26 27

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Elli Schmidt, ‘Das Institut für Bekleidungskultur und Seine Aufgaben’ [The Institute for the Culture of Dress and Its Tasks], Die Bekleidung, 1 (1954), 4. The fashion magazine Die Bekleidung was founded in 1954, and published by IBK in order to promote its activities. Accordingly, the main contributor was the Institute’s director Elli Schmidt. Ibid. J. Spalová, ‘Č SR zvítě zila v módní soutě ži’ [Czechoslovak Republic Won the Fashion Contest], Žena a móda, Prague 5 (1951), 25. J. Spalová and J. Úspě ch, ‘Č eskoslovenkého odě vnictví v Ně mecké demokratické republice’ [Success of Czech Clothes in the German Democratic Republic], Žena a móda, Prague 12 (1952), 23.

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accompanied the article presented dresses whose style varied between discreet fashionability and traditional gracefulness. Politically informed discussions between textile experts and representatives from the ministries of light industry of the respective countries provided an opportunity for the exchange of technical knowledge and experience in the ‘culture of dress’, as the word ‘fashion’ itself had not yet been officially mentioned (Figure 25.4). In fact, the professional aspirations of the designers to adjust Western fashionability to the new reality had increasingly been crushed by the advancing Stalinist myth. Due to their close economic and political ties with the Soviet Union, the new regimes

Figure 25.4

The fourth dress contest held in Prague in 1953: Žena a móda (Woman and Fashion), Prague, no. 11, 1953.

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could neither stop nor slow down the course of Soviet-style industrialization which, following post-war deprivations, further impoverished their citizens and extended the rationing of everyday goods well into the 1950s. At the same time, the Central East European regimes finally adopted the Soviet model of the grandiose sartorial prototype to suit the mythical reality in which they found shelter from the irresolvable problems which their planned economies faced in everyday life. Escape into myth prevented the development of any space for a genuinely new socialist dress. Just as in the Soviet Union, the activities of the socialist central fashion institutions tamed fashion trends, to prevent unpredictable change from taking place (Figure 25.5).

Figure 25.5

Classical trend: Žena a móda (Woman and Fashion), Prague, no. 12, 1952.

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socialist official fashion, 1950s–1980s In the immediate post-war period, the centralized economic model strengthened, as the powerful bureaucracy established under Stalinism continued to govern the industry through an overcentralized system informed by consecutive Five-Year Plans.29 In 1949, the existing Moscow Dom modelei was transformed into the central Obshchesoiuznyi Dom modelei (All-Union House of Prototypes, ODMO), while the establishment of regional Dom modelei completed the centralized, hierarchical model of Soviet dress design.30 Makarova and Gorelenkova continued to work at the central dress institution through its subsequent transformations even in the mid-1950s,31 while Gorelenkova’s colleague Anna Blank, who already in 1937 strongly supported both sartorial prototype and reliance on the ethnic,32 became the first artistic director of the AllUnion Dom modelei, remaining there until 1958 (Figure 25.6). In 1962, for example, the journal Soviet Union stated that the Leningrad Dom modelei designed 2,500 prototypes in the previous year, claiming that ‘nearly all of them were accepted for mass production’.33 The media, such as Zhurnal mod (Fashion Journal) and Modeli sezona (Models of the Seasons), continued to report on the activities of the various Dom modelei throughout the socialist period.34 The names of the designers were usually quoted and attributed to the particular Dom modelei which employed them, contributing to a certain credibility for the outfits. The magazine 29

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32 33 34

The first two Plans in the post-war period – the Fourth Five-Year Plan (1945–51) and the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1951–5) – emphasized the development of heavy industry and transportation. The Sixth Five-Year Plan which started in 1956 was eventually abandoned in 1957 and turned into a new Seven-Year Plan, which focused on the chemical industry and the rise of consumer goods. Simultaneously, the regional Moscow Dom modelei was established in line with the institution of other regional Dom modelei. In the years 1944–8, Anna Blank was chief artistic director of the Moscow Dom modelei. On Gorelenkova, see also A. F. Blank, ‘O Fekle Antonovne Gorelenkovoi’, Zhurnal mod, 3 (1973). Blank, ‘Nekotorye itogi raboty Doma modelei’. L. Leonov, ‘Fashions for Fun and Pleasure’, Soviet Union, 143 (1962), 44–5. Zhurnal mod was started in 1945 and joined the 1930s magazine Modeli sezona in promoting the Stalinist mythical culture by publishing the drawings and images of smart garments produced as prototypes in the All-Union and the regional Dom modelei.

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Figure 25.6

Ethnic motifs: Sovetskaiia zhenschina (Soviet Woman), Moscow, no. 4, 1946.

Soviet Union boasted in 1963 that the VIAlegprom (All-Union Institute for Light Industry Goods) had ‘a large staff of artists, designers, fabric experts, engineers and planners, and that its activities were impressive’ and added that ‘Last year these arbiters of fashion discussed 32,709 models, ranging from fabrics and knitted goods to buttons, bracelets and hair-combs. Of these, 17,867 were recommended for production. The Institute also prepared 12,530 albums and 1,652 sample books containing 2,710,000 different patterns and sent them out to factories and fashion houses.’35 Equally, the AllUnion Dom modelei employed more than sixty designers in the 35

V. Gorin, ‘Comfort, Simplicity and Economy’, Soviet Union, 160 (1963), 46–7, at 46. While VIAlegprom and the ODMO competed against each other, their tasks overlapped. The ODMO was more dedicated to fashion design, while the

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mid-1960s, including those working in its special experimental atelier and those designing prototype collections for industry. The physical existence of these institutions and their designers provided an element of reality, but socialist official fashion did not exist in the real world. It inhabited the limitless mythical space introduced under Stalinism and transported to the Central East European countries after the war. The socialist official fashion maintained its mythical status, precisely because the Stalinist ruling bureaucracy interiorized the logic of mythical perfection in its vigorous attempts to present Stalinist reality as the best possible world. Successive governments in the Soviet Union and Central East Europe carefully nurtured the existing system, increasingly employing more and more staff on the creative, technical, and administrative levels. Synthetic fabrics were perceived as the ultimate socialist materials – technological, modern, scientific, aesthetic, and able to satisfy consumer demands. East Germany was delegated, among the countries of the socialist bloc, to research the application of plastic in industrial design and man-made fabrics.36 In an attempt to achieve world leadership in the production of nylon, East Germany changed the internationally accepted name Perlon into Dederon, which evoked the name of the country – Deutsche Demokratische Republik. At fashion shows abroad, outfits designed by the Deutsches Modeinstitut (DMI), using Dederon and traditional Plauen lace, were presented as unique products of socialist Germany.37 Apart from Dederon, DMI was instrumental in promoting other man-made fabrics such as Wolcrylon – a blend of wool and synthetic fibre Polyacrylnitril.38 East Germany constantly connected the development of new synthetic fabrics to socialist progress. Präsent 20, launched on the twentieth

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VIAlegprom was more closely connected to the textile and clothing industries. For an overview, see Raymond G. Stokes, ‘Plastics and the New Society: The German Democratic Republic in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (eds.), Style and Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 65–80. See, for example, ‘Dederon and Plauen Lace’, GDR Review, 11 (1959), 57. ‘We Love Woollens’, GDR Review, 1 (1960), 28–9; ‘Wolcrylon: Wolfen Polyacrylnitril’, GDR Review, 2 (1960), 20–3.

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anniversary of the GDR, was praised as an ideal material for outerwear and as a versatile fashion fabric.39 Regardless of the proclaimed scientific approach to textile design, the Soviets continually relied on couture – bespoke garments and handmade embellishment – in their attempts to invent new socialist dress. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev affirmed his rule by simultaneously politically denouncing Stalin and declaring war on excessive Stalinist aesthetics. In contrast to the Stalinist preference for grandness and preciousness, a new style – socialist good taste – was characterized by simple and moderate lines. The concept of modesty was officially promoted, though the old-fashioned concept of luxury was never abandoned. Timeless grandiose creations were welcomed by the ruling bureaucracy, as they implied that changes within fashion production were not needed. The field of fashion production could not be organized on different principles to those on which the whole system was organized. Until the end of socialism, the ODMO and its regional branches imposed trends on textile and clothing companies, which, due to the hierarchical levels of decision-making, caused delays in promoting new styles, and also diluted their quality. The historian Moshe Lewin states that the ‘cult of Stalin’ was substituted by the ‘cult of the state’, and that bureaucracy had turned the Party into its own ‘ruling servant’. Lewin calls the Soviet system ‘bureaucratic absolutism’ and argues that Khrushchev’s project failed because the radical changes that he planned did not suit the ruling bureaucracy.40 Nevertheless, Khrushchev’s political opening towards the West in the 1960s brought a change, if not in the functioning of the system, then surely in accepting fashion changes at the representational level. A new group of professionally educated designers, such as Slava Zaitsev, Tamara Mokeeva, Tat’iana Os’merkina, Galina Gagarina, and Iulia Denisova, entered the field of Soviet official fashion, after graduating from the Moscow Textile Institute, and their modernist designs started to appear frequently in the media, announced as the ODMO’s outfits 39 40

‘Präsent 20’, GDR Review, 2 (1971), 6–7. Moshe Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York: The New Press, 1995), 204–8.

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Figure 25.7

‘New Suit’. Designer Iulia Denisova, Zhurnal mod (Fashion Journal), Moscow, no. 1, 1968.

(Figure 25.7).41 Slava Zaitsev (b. 1938) craved Western fashion and tried hard to keep up with the latest trends but became well known at home and abroad only after his 1965 collection, 41

Following in the footsteps of the 1920s schools VKhUTEMAS and VKhUTEIN, the Textile Institute was established in 1929. Initially, it educated only textile engineers, gradually incorporating textile design during the 1930s, and introducing the study of fashion design only in the late 1950s. Interview with the Dean of the Textile Institute, Tat’iana Kozlova, Moscow, June 2004.

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Figure 25.8

Slava Zaitsev with his models, Soviet Export, Moscow, 1975.

‘Russian Series’. At home, his designs were appreciated because their quotations privileged Russian historical imagery over Western fashions, meaning that they did not capitulate to the Western concept of rapid change. On the other hand, the West liked his style because it fulfilled the Western preconceptions of an exotic, far-away culture, and indeed his dresses travelled the world from Canada to Japan, France, Italy, and Yugoslavia, from 1965 to 1976, and earned him the nickname ‘Red Dior’ in the Western media (Figure 25.8).42 As the political and cultural opening towards the West grew in Central East European states, the main task of their central fashion

42

After Western media nicknamed him ‘Red Dior’ in the mid-1960s, Zaitsev was not allowed to travel to the West for twenty years, but continued to be the most respected fashion designer at home, and his dresses continued to represent Soviet fashion. Interview with Slava Zaitsev, Moscow, June 2004. For an overview on Zaitsev, see Nina Tarasova and Yulia Popova, Viacheslav Zaitsev v Ermitazhe [Viacheslav Zaitsev at the Hermitage] (St Petersburg: The State Hermitage Museum, 2016).

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institutions – to control and tame fashion trends – became even more important. In their ontological fear of change, the regimes not only employed ever more staff but also kept changing the names of their respective institutions. By 1974, the Hungarian central fashion institution, now called Magyar Divat Intézet (Hungarian Fashion Institute, MDI), employed over two hundred people in its three departments.43 The MDI mediated between the state and fashion. As expressed in the Ministry’s founding act, the tasks of the MDI stretched to marketing, advertising, organizing exhibitions, fashion presentations abroad, coordinating both domestic production and exports, disseminating information on the new fashion trends and technological developments, educating designers and managers within the clothing companies, as well as educating the general public in the culture of dress. When information about fashion became more readily available in the 1970s and Hungarian clothing companies started to export to the West on a larger scale, the MDI intensified its activities. They even chose the buttons on outfits produced by the clothing industry, and carefully coordinated the styles and colours of clothes, knitting, and shoes, in order to avoid stylistic clashes between them.44 In 1958, the Czechoslovak Tekstilní Tvorba became Ústav bytové a odĕ vni kultury (Institute of Material and Dress Culture, ÚBOK). The change of name announced much deeper transformations, bringing the whole field of lifestyle activities under the control of ÚBOK which in future would be in charge of all international Czechoslovak fashion presentations. The East German IBK launched an official seasonal fashion forecast Modelinie in 1956, emphasizing that it would be inspired by international fashion rhythms.45 Its new image was confirmed by its 43

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Although the same designers continued working in the central fashion institution, the Hungarian Ministry of Light Industry constantly changed its name and structure, increasing its representational role with each new reorganization. In 1963, three units – clothes, knitting, and shoes – were merged into the Ruházati Mintatervezö Vállalat (Prototype Clothing Design Company), only to be recalled into Divat Tervezö Vállalat (Fashion Design Company) in 1968. This information on Magyar Divat Intézet comes from my interview with Éva Mészáros (Budapest, 2004), who spent forty years as designer at the Hungarian central fashion institution. Interview with Éva Mészáros, 2004. G. Malik, ‘Am Anfang war das Institut’ [At the Beginning Was the Institute], Sibylle, 5 (1961), 39.

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change of name from IBK into Deutsches Modeinstitut (German Fashion Institute, DMI) in the following year. In 1958, the Polish Bureau for Fashion Presentation at the Leipzig Fair turned into the central fashion institution Moda Polska (Polish Fashion) with Jadwiga Grabowska as its artistic director.46 Grabowska’s main duty was to add a dose of serious glamour to socialist fashion. The regime relied on her impeccable high bourgeois upbringing and her knowledge of pre-war dress rituals.47 Grabowska’s aesthetics, influenced by Paris haute couture, corresponded perfectly to the regime’s representational needs, especially because she preferred Chanel’s timeless style. Due to her innate sense for fashion and her regular visits to the Parisian couture salons, Grabowska eventually acknowledged the changes brought by the early 1960s youthful fashions. In 1966, she showed a youthful collection inspired by Courrèges at the Autumn Leipzig Fair.48 Moreover, Moda Polska’s perfectly executed collections under her command earned the Polish central fashion institution praise, both in the so-called Eastern bloc and internationally. In a well-informed article on the phenomenon of socialist fashion, the US weekly Time called Grabowska ‘the dictator of Polish fashion’.49 According to contemporaries, her managerial style might indeed have been dictatorial, but Grabowska nevertheless educated a new generation of young Polish designers who creatively engaged with both Polish ethnic heritage and Paris fashion once she retired in 1967. In relation to the former, Kalina Paroll’s 1969 collection equally drew on the sartorial traditions of the Zakopane region and the contemporary Western hippy culture. On the other hand, Jerzy Antkowiak (b. 1935) became Moda 46

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For an overview of Moda Polska’s activities, see Joanna Kowalska and Moż dż yń ska-Nawotka, Fashionable in Communist Poland (Cracow: National Museum and Wroclaw: National Museum, 2016); Marcin Róż yc, Paulina Latham, and Beata Dudzic, Chrysalis (London: Polish Cultural Institute in London, Pola Arts Foundation, 2016); Ewa Rzechorzek, Moda Polska Warszawa (Warsaw: PWN SA, 2018). H. Groszowa, ‘Warszawski Dior’ [Warsaw Dior], Polska, 4 (1959) 17–19. The article pointed out that Grabowska had learned about colours and proportions during her upbringing in a family of prosperous architects. ‘Jedes Jahr zur Lepiziger Messe: Moda Polska’ [Each Year at the Leipzig Fair: Moda Polska], Sibylle, 1 (1967), 23–9. Anonymous, ‘The New Class’, Time, Friday, 13 August 1965.

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Polska’s most prominent designer, creating and showing the theatrical collections, equally inspired by art and Yves Saint Laurent’s radical fashions, from transparent blouses to women wearing menstyle clothes.50 His presentations were occasionally criticized by the authorities, but had been widely popular with the media, especially with the modernist magazine Ty i ja. Similarly to the East German Sibylle, Ty i ja visually demonstrated the 1960s aspirations for a different social and political system, which could only take place in the fluid, yet marginalized, spaces in which the official and the informal were allowed to merge. The official discourse recognized both the modernist Ty i ja aesthetic and Antkowiak’s Westernized sartorial styles as useful mediums to internationally present the socialist Poland as a modern and forward-looking state (Figure 25.9).51 Heinz Bormann (1918–89) played an important role in the East German fashion scene throughout the 1950s and 1960s. His aesthetic was conventionally elegant, so suitable for the regime’s representational needs, and he also maintained a very special relationship with the state. Bormann had started his private fashion house immediately after the war, but only developed his business and advanced technologically after he entered into partnership with the state in 1956. The regime, which eventually owned 50 per cent of the business, needed Bormann as much as he needed the state’s political and material support. The fashion house continued to act under his name in the city of Magdeburg, specializing in the production of haute couture-style outfits. Bormann regularly presented his exclusive collections at the Leipzig International Fair and, with the full approval of the regime, took his outfits to fashion shows in Stockholm, Cairo, and Beirut. Apart from the representational role, Bormann’s perfectly organized and highly productive 50

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In 2018–19, the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź organized the large exhibition Jerzy Antkowiak – Moda Polska, with dresses, drawings, and other artefacts from his personal collection. The monthly Ty i ja (1960–73) was started by the fashion journalist Teresa Kuczyń ska and the loyal socialist Roman Juryś and published by the Polish Women’s League. The graphic designer Roman Cieś lewicz, the magazine’s artistic director during its first three years, created a novel graphic layout for Ty i ja. Yet, regardless of a huge interest in the magazine, the regime capped its circulation to 80,000, so controlling its distribution and consumption.

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Figure 25.9 Youthful style at the Polish central fashion institution: Moda Polska: Ty i ja (You and I), Warsaw, no. 5, May 1969 (detail).

enterprise significantly contributed to East German exports, equally to the socialist countries and the West, and made both the state and the designer himself rich. Bormann was nicknamed ‘Socialist Dior’ in both the domestic and Western media. In 1965, the West German magazine Der Spiegel stated that ‘Bormann learned in Paris to sprinkle GDR-made wardrobes with a touch of capitalist noblesse.’52 His outfits, mostly made from imported lace, 52

See, for example, Anonymous, ‘Roter Dior’ [Red Dior], Der Spiegel, 20 October 1965, 43, 59; for an overview of Bormann’s relationship with the state, see Ulrike Köpp, ‘Heinz Bormann – der Dior der DDR’, UTOPIE kreativ, 123 (2001), 42–51.

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silk, and taffeta, were worn by the wives of the political elite, including Lotte Ulbricht, wife of a pre-eminent East German leader. However, in the spring of 1971, the shift in power in the Party and state apparatus from Walter Ulbricht to Erich Honecker also significantly changed economic policies. Regardless of the economic analysis showing that such a move would hurt the business, Bormann’s enterprise was fully nationalized a year later, under the name VEB Magdeburger Damenmoden (Figure 25.10).53 Travelling between annual socialist fashion congresses, domestic fairs, the Leipzig International Fairs, and lavish presentations in the West, the central fashion institutions’ prototype collections produced a new sartorial reality which differed markedly from the everyday dress which could be found in local shops.54 The 1961 international fashion show in Leipzig included the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Holland, Sweden, and France. Engaging all the participants, its finale revealed the highest representational level of the socialist sartorial ambitions, as their extravagant outfits were in sharp contrast to the smart yet wearable clothes of their commercially minded Western counterparts.55 Relying on its exclusive prototype collections, socialist official fashion also ventured beyond its borders, daring to display its aesthetics in a safe environment of international exhibitions and trade fairs. Replicas of Sputniks I and II, celebrated Soviet spacecraft, commanded the huge Soviet pavilion at the Brussels World Exhibition in 1958, but fashion was not neglected. Yet, in contrast to the Soviet cutting-edge technological achievements, fashion was represented by a conventionally elegant collection of dresses and ensembles embellished with ethnic decorations. However, the Hungarian collection of 120 outfits designed by RTV, and mainly 53

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Volkseigener Betrieb (publicly owned enterprise, abbreviated VEB), was the main legal form of industrial enterprise in East Germany. They were all publicly owned and were formed after mass nationalization between 1945 and the early 1960s. In this sense, and only due to his close relationship with the regime, Bormann managed to avoid full nationalization up to 1972. Started in 1950 under the name Dress Contest, the event changed its name to ‘International Fashion Congress’ in Moscow in 1957, and these annual gatherings, moving from one socialist capital to another, lasted till 1990. A. Donskaia, ‘Pokaz mod v Leiptsige’ [Fashion Show at Leipzig], Zhurnal mod, 3 (1961), 14.

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Figure 25.10 East German socialist official fashion: Bormann Magdeburg dress design, Sibylle, East Berlin, no. 2, 1956. Getty Images.

including smart cocktail dresses and eveningwear, won a Grand Prix in Brussels. Hungarian Review commented that the Brussels Grand Prix ‘pays tribute to the skill and talent of Hungarian designers and the development of the Hungarian fashion industry’.56 Throughout the 1960s, Hungary actively continued to promote socialist fashion at fashion shows held in the West. The Hungarian state company Hungarotex organized fashion events in Copenhagen, Oslo, Bergen, West Berlin, Rome, Milan, New York, and Toronto, presenting clothes that could not be bought in shops at home.57 Similarly exclusive export collections, designed within 56

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‘Budapest Fashion Letter’, Hungarian Review, 11 (1958), 19–21. This magazine was a propaganda monthly published in several foreign languages and meant mainly for Western audiences. Agi Oblath, who throughout the 1960s and 1970s was in charge of the organization of Hungarian fashion presentations in the West, shared her memories about those events in an interview with me (Budapest, 1999).

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the East German Fashion Institute and small workshops such as VEB Elegant, also travelled the world, from Düsseldorf to Cairo and Helsinki, spreading the news of ‘Berliner chic’.58 In 1967, the Soviets dared to compete with Western fashion trends, at least in a strictly controlled format of a festival. Organized by the ODMO, the International Fashion Festival presented the latest socialist and Western collections, including those by the leading Paris couture houses of Chanel and Christian Dior. The jury acknowledged Chanel’s presentation as the best current trend, but the Grand Prix was awarded to Tat’iana Os’merkina from the ODMO for her long red dress, resembling a traditional Russian dress sarafan, and called Russia. The festival was intended to demonstrate that the socialist system had caught up with the West in fashion. But the centralized way of proposing and approving fashion trends did not change. In order to present their unified vision at the Moscow International Fashion Festival, the socialist countries – East Germany, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia – had met beforehand at their own fashion congress in the Bulgarian city of Varna and discussed their respective collections.59 The shifts towards fashionability from the mid-1960s was evident in the socialist collections presented at the Moscow fashion festival. Equally, fashionable clothes were promoted in the pages of the Soviet Zhurnal mod, the Hungarian Ez a divat (This Is Fashion), the East German Sibylle, and the Polish Ty i ja.60 Those designs – from miniskirts and dresses with geometrical lines in the late 1960s to the bohemian style of the 1970s and wide-shouldered jackets in the mid-1980s – clearly showed that the designers from the central fashion institutions successfully addressed Western fashion themes. However, socialist official fashion was neither 58

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‘Berliner Chic in aller Welt’ [Berlin Chic in All the World], Sibylle, 5 (1958), 31. Editorial, Zhurnal mod, 2 (1968). While all these, and some other magazines, presented the official socialist fashion, they nevertheless differed among themselves. Zhurnal mod and Ez a divat were officially aligned to the central fashion associations, while Sibylle (with Dorothea Melis as fashion editor from 1961 to 1970) and Ty i ja (throughout the 1960s) used socialist official fashion as a ‘raw’ material in composing their modernist visions of dress.

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about fashion, nor about clothes. It was always simply a discourse, with little bearing on reality. As the agents who mediated between socialist official fashion and Western fashion, the fashion designers within the national central fashion institutions were unable to initiate a process which would have changed the ontological status of socialist official fashion. Even when Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika (1985–91) tried to introduce changes in the design and production of socialist fashion, those attempts failed, due both to the power of bureaucracy and to the fear of change that could not be controlled, built into the socialist system from the 1930s.

socialist everyday fashion, 1960s–1980s As an ideological construct, socialist official fashion had constantly been unaffected by the poor quality of clothes in the shops. Thus, women were compelled to use a whole range of informal channels, from relying on the services of a seamstress to the black market and networks of connections to obtain desired dresses in their everyday life. In the Soviet Union, the state-owned ateliers offered custommade clothes, but their quality varied. The existence of do-it-yourself columns in women’s magazines, which were regularly accompanied by paper patterns, additionally linked the fantasy world with the dysfunctional socialist consumer reality. All these state-supported or informally run activities resulted in another specific socialist sartorial phenomenon – everyday fashion. While socialist official fashion was set in the country’s slow master narrative, everyday fashion was embedded in an unofficial modernity which ran in parallel to official modernity and became increasingly more important from the late 1950s on. In contrast to slow-moving official fashion and its fears of change, everyday fashion recognized change and individual expression in dress, setting its practices in semi-official, informal, or even illegal areas of socialist everyday life. Such spaces increasingly grew during the Cold War period, due to Khrushchev’s opening to the West, which itself soon turned into a race in everyday culture between the Soviet Union and the West. While Khrushchev inherited Stalin’s middle classes, he tried to reshape them to fit his vision of the new modern society. He also needed a wider participation of Soviet citizenry in his

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project: first, to support his radically new political turn, and, second, to entrust them with public performances of middleclass rituals, in order to compete more convincingly with the West. Observing the political and social changes in the socialist countries in the 1960s, Ken Jowitt argued that the relationship between the regime and society was changing from domination through terror to domination by symbolic manipulation.61 In contrast to the privileged highest strata of the Nomenklatura, whose members clandestinely enjoyed expensive status symbols, the new middle classes were publicly encouraged to move into the socialist sartorial version of prettiness and cosiness. A conventional aesthetic of socialist good taste was an ideal medium to filter, neutralize, and slow down fashion changes, and to offer safe sartorial choices to those who were new to the sophisticated rituals of dressing up. An official reconceptualization of gender was also channelled through women’s magazines, advice manuals, and etiquette books from the late 1950s on. In contrast to both the 1920s austere Bolshevik woman and the 1930s Stalinist mythical Superwoman, a new ideal woman connected the old puritanical idea of modesty with new categories such as prettiness and elegance. A tacit deal can be traced between Khrushchev’s regime and its nascent middle classes, through which consumption and fashion practices were legitimized.62 Khrushchev’s process of the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union raised hopes in the socialist countries under its control that a real political change would take place. However, during the 1950s, Khrushchev violently crushed such expectations in East Germany, Hungary, and Poland. Instead, as in the Soviet Union, a new emphasis on consumption and a higher standard of living also took place in the so-called Eastern bloc. In Poland, the 61

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Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 99–100. Accordingly, Khrushchev’s political deal with his middle classes was supported by the economic preferences set down in the 1959 Seven-Year Plan, and tirelessly promoted in the contemporary media. See also Millar’s observations on Brezhnev’s ‘little deal’: J. R. Millar, ‘The Little Deal: Brezhnev’s Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism’, in T. L. Thompson and R. Sheldon (eds.), Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 3–19.

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Communist leader Władysław Gomulka combined deStalinization with increased consumption and new liberties in the arts. Similarly, in other Central East European countries, an essential element of the deals struck between the regimes and their new middle classes was that freedom in consumer practices should not bring the nature of political rule into question. Emphasizing the role of consumption in post-Stalinist societies, Václav Havel claimed that the system ‘has been built on foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society’.63 In 1963, the East German regime attempted significant economic reforms, accompanied by a political thaw and an emphasis on raising the supply and quality of consumer goods. Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the ruling Communist Party SED, had already written a letter to Khrushchev in January 1961, stating that the lack of investment in the consumer goods sector would have long-term economic and political consequences. As observed by Paul Betts: ‘It was precisely in the sphere of consumerism where much of this political pressure surfaced – not surprisingly, since material prosperity and consumer satisfaction were often used as yardsticks by both German governments to measure progress and legitimacy. The SED was squeezed between market ideology from the West and the consumer demands of its own populace.’64 Equally, the Hungarian president János Kádár in his economic reform efforts, encouraged the middle classes to consume, and raised the quantity and variety of products on offer, so as to secure their loyalty for the socialist project. Elemér Hankiss called the unofficial and unsigned deal of the late 1960s and 1970s, made between the ruling elite and the Hungarian majority, ‘Pax 63

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Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in John Keane (ed.), The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central Eastern Europe (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), 38. But the Czech middle class betrayed that unofficial deal in 1968, by trying to obtain more political freedoms during the Prague Spring. So their deal was revoked, and it was only in the early 1970s during the period of normalization that a deal was renegotiated in Czechoslovakia. De-politicization after the Prague Spring expressed itself through an emphasis on consumption, which rose by 36.5 per cent from 1970 until 1978. Paul Betts, ‘The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture’, Journal of Modern History, 72/3 (2000), 731–65, at 748, where Ulbricht’s letter is also cited.

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Kadariensis’.65 He argued that under that deal the Hungarian leadership assumed the role of a benevolent monarch and allowed the socialist middle class to develop on the basis of the ‘second society’.66 As the regimes abandoned harsh repression for more subtle ways of controlling their citizens, elements of Western modernity were gradually allowed to penetrate everyday life. In Central East Europe, the second society started to spread, offering goods and services that the state did not provide, from small fashion salons to shoe repair shops, hair salons, and beauty parlours. Elemér Hankiss observed that the first and second society existed in parallel in Hungary from the 1960s. Ignored by the regimes, the activities of the second society were part of everyday life, widening the field of Western-type modernity. Following the Hungarian economic reform in 1968, companies came under political pressure to improve the quality of goods on the domestic market, and better-quality clothes appeared in flagship department stores in Budapest such as Luxus. Smart dresses could be distinguished from mass-produced ones by their limited production runs and high prices,67 and this exclusivity suited the discriminating members of the middle classes. The Hungarian central Fashion Institute opened its own shop in the early 1970s, selling samples and small batches of dresses, which catered for the more style-conscious Budapest women.68 In Prague, the

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Elemér Hankiss, East European Alternatives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Different authors observed the development of unofficial economies and unofficial social networks in the Soviet Union and the Central European socialist countries from the 1960s. Hankiss called that phenomenon ‘second society’ and argued that the first official society and the second unofficial society existed in parallel in Hungary, complementing each other (ibid.). Clothing companies used to export decent quality goods, either to the West or to the socialist COMECON market, and in the latter case they were subsidized by the state. When these companies came under political pressure to deliver good-quality clothes to the domestic market as well, they tended to keep their prices at the export levels in order to compensate for the lost state subsidies. See G. Réti, ‘Price Level in Clothing and Price Politics’, Monthly Trade Report of the Ministry of Home Trade and the Ministry of Foreign Trade (November 1978), 20–4. This information comes from my interview with Éva Mészáros (2004). She stated that the Fashion Institute’s shop was very popular and had regular customers.

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Dů m módy (House of Fashion) sold high-quality clothes and adapted Western fashion trends to socialist good taste. Their dresses were produced in small batches by the designers in the central Institute for Material and Dress Culture (ÚBOK), but also by experts from the previously privately owned fashion salons, and by the small, specialized ateliers within the big clothing companies.69 Officially, the Czech Dů m módy was a laboratory for fashionable dress, whose limited production was meant to encourage the acceptance of fashion trends and guarantee quality. In practice, its discreetly fashionable and expensive dresses catered for the more prosperous and sophisticated members of the middle classes. The Polish central fashion institution Moda Polska also opened an elite chain of shops in Warsaw and other big cities where small collections of its expensive and elegant dresses were sold. By the 1980s the East German regime had opened a chain of four hundred Exquisit shops in response to the increased spending power of its middle class and the desire of its members to dress up. The expensive dresses and fashion accessories in Exquisit shops were made entirely from Western fabrics and produced by state factories which exclusively supplied that elite chain. Exquisit’s chief designer Arthur Winter, previously lead designer at the Deutsches Modeinstitut (MDI), selected those factories and recruited their best designers.70 The Politburo abandoned its initial doubts about the ideological suitability of Exquisit, because it brought large revenues to the state budget. Moreover, the middle class was willing to pay high prices for good-quality dresses, and especially decent shoes, which were otherwise practically 69

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The House of Modern Dress was established in 1966, by a merger of the department store House of Fashion, the association of the ex-private fashion salons and the shop Darex, which used to sell exclusive goods for foreign currency. See H. Procházková, ‘Deset let Domu módy’ [Ten Years of the House of Fashion], Žena a móda, 7 (1966), 16–17. My information on the Exquisit activities partly comes from my interview with Dorothea Melis, who, after the ideological pressures rose, left Sibylle in 1970, and became Exquisit managing director. Once fully developed, the Exquisit chain had an annual trade in the value of three billion Deutschmarks (interview, Berlin, January 2008). For an overview of the Exquisit chain and other types of East German dress consumption, see also Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics and Consumer Culture in East Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

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unavailable. However, such elite shops could not meet the demand of the growing numbers of middle-class consumers due to both their predictable styles and their limited supply. The Polish designer Barbara Hoff (b. 1932) started to present youthful dresses in the Polish picture weekly Przekrój in the late 1950s. Her designs were exclusively young styles: dresses with barrel-shaped skirts, little suits, summer sheaths, bikinis à la Brigitte Bardot, mannish white blouses for the girls, beach shorts and striped narrow trousers. Moreover, they were presented on young models with long loose hair or pigtails, depicted in unassuming fashion spreads located in the street or on the beach. Although the shoots were carefully styled to convey an impression of relaxed informality, they always contained practical advice, bringing fashionability within the reach of an ambitious home dressmaker. Regardless of youthful styles, there was a seriousness to Hoff’s do-it-yourself column. Her designs were presented under her surname as the Przekrój’s exclusive collections and protected by copyright.71 Hoff knew her public well and started to produce small collections, sold at the boutique under her name at the Junior Department Store in Warsaw. In 1974, she started the brand Hoffland which became hugely popular with Polish fashionable customers, to whom she offered numerous styles, from casual sport fashions to safari, asymmetry, and the 1980s padded shoulders. Actively engaging with the domestic textile and accessories factories, Hoff managed to keep Hoffland’s production going even in the bleak 1980s, when, due to the fall of the Solidarity movement and imposition of martial law, shortages became even more acute.72 While not taking place openly, new consumption practices also happened in the Soviet Union. Adele Marie Barker states that ‘It was precisely in this area of the unofficial that most of Soviet life flourished. It was here in the everyday that the grand master narrative of the Soviet Union moved in a Bakhtinian sense from the 71

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See, for example, Barbara Hoff, ‘Dziś – Letnia kolekcja własna Przekroju’ [Today: Przekrój’s Own Summer Collection], Przekrój, Cracow, 793 (1960), 16–17; Przekrój, Cracow, 798 (1960), 16–17. For an overview of Barbara Hoff’s activities, see Kowalska and Moż dż yń skaNawotka, Fashionable in Communist Poland; see also Róż yc et al., Chrysalis, Sheet 10.

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monologic to the polylogic as Soviet citizens proceeded to reformulate or subvert it – not with the intent of bringing down the system, but simply to buy a decent pair of shoes.’73 Apart from the mass-manufacture of clothes by large state companies, the only other officially recognized Soviet type of dress production was offered by the state-owned fashion ateliers. They offered custom-made clothes and accessories to all categories of citizens in order to make up for the poor quality and limited variety of sizes of mass-manufactured clothes, but the quality of their service was often very low, with an inadequate choice of fabrics.74 For many Soviet women, therefore, the discreet service provided by a skilful seamstress was the most important tactic in their efforts to dress smartly and challenge socialist cultural isolationism. Such relationships were widespread, but both the client and the seamstress had to be careful, as the institution of self-employment was not legally recognized. However, the discreet army of small dressmakers acted as unrecognized couturières by relying on their skills and the occasional old copy of a Western fashion magazine. In Central East Europe, the institution of the dressmaker belonged to the vast, mostly unofficial field of everyday dress. Here, the dressmaker appeared in a variety of guises in different countries, as a skilled seamstress who would visit a client’s home, as a selfemployed dressmaker working from small private premises, or even as an owner of a respected fashion salon who tried to produce a socialist version of haute couture dresses. The Hungarian Klára Rothschild (1903–1976) staged her biannual fashion shows in luxurious spaces such as the Gundel restaurant in Budapest or the ballroom of the smart Gellért hotel. She was able to stay in business because of her good connections with the new regime.75 Her fashion 73

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Adele Marie Barker, ‘The Culture Factory: Theorizing the Popular in the Old and New Russia’, in Adele Marie Barker (ed.), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 12–45, at 22. In 1975, for example, the state spent 34 million roubles on repairs in Moscow alone, due to the bad quality of industrially produced clothes; for an overview, see E. Gerasimova and S. Chuikina, ‘Obshchestvo remonta’ [The Repair Society], NZ, 34 (electronic version, 2004). Officially, Rothschild’s salon did not carry her name anymore. It was called Különlegességi Nő i Ruhaszalon (Special Dresses Salon for Women) and renamed Clara Salon in 1976. For a detailed account of Rothschild’s career,

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shows were attended by the new political elite, whose members were also her customers. The attention that Klára Rothschild’s fashion presentations commanded in the Hungarian popular and fashion press in the early 1960s declared the new times. She travelled regularly to Paris at that time to learn about the latest trends and to buy lavish fabrics for her outfits. Her luxurious and Westernized seasonal collections were direct copies of Givenchy and Coco Chanel dresses, which, she said, were preferred by her clients.76 Precisely, her good connections with the Hungarian ruling party, and in the West, enabled Rothschild to travel abroad and obtain top-quality fabrics. Used by both professional seamstresses and women who made their own clothes, paper patterns played a special role in the field of everyday fashion, even more so as the official aesthetics of socialist good taste began to encourage women to be pretty and feminine in their everyday life. Moreover, Lidiia Orlova, a fashion and interiors editor of the Soviet popular weekly Rabotnitsa (Working Woman), succeeded in making ubiquitous paper patterns more reliable and attractive to her readers by obtaining, in 1978, permission from the German magazine Burda to use its paper patterns.77 Like advice columns, paper patterns served a dual role: to disseminate Western fashion trends that were being gradually acknowledged, but also to control the process of dissemination. While they both helped to resolve the clash between dreams of the latest trends and socialist dysfunctional consumerist reality, the former hinted that the dreams could be achieved by self-provision (Figure 25.11). Women’s and fashion magazines in other socialist countries also offered paper patterns. They provided templates for desirable

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see Ildikó Simonovics, Rotschild Klára: a vörös divatkirálynő [Klára Rothschild: The Red Fashion Queen] (Budapest: Jaffa Kiadó, 2019). Anonymous, ‘The New Class’, Time, 13 August 1965. The article also stated that Klara Rothschild was with ‘a state-paid salary of $20,000 a year, one of János Kádár’s most generously valued national assets’. Lidiia Orlova shared with me her experiences about her editorship of Rabotnitsa in the period 1970–86. She introduced more pages on fashion and started to present fashion through fashion editorials. Showing an independent spirit, Orlova wrote to Mrs Burda asking her for permission to print their paper patterns, and finally obtained the permission for free. By the end of her period in Rabotnitsa the circulation of the magazine reached 26 million (interview, Moscow, June 2004).

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Figure 25.11

‘Raw Silk’, Zhurnal mod (Fashion Journal), Moscow, no. 1, Spring 1961.

dresses without any obligation on the regimes to deliver them, but they nevertheless facilitated women’s desire for prettiness, because they offered only slightly more of what was in any case allowed. As they were unable to buy dresses complying with the

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officially promoted aesthetics in the shops, women achieved the approved ideal in do-it-yourself versions. Moreover, this practice allowed for some difference, such as an individual play with colour or use of an unusual fabric. Since the authorities discreetly acknowledged both the necessary and symbolic roles of do-ityourself dress, the choice of fabrics for home dressmaking was more varied than fabrics used for mass-produced clothes.

socialist alternative fashion: the 1980s Starting in the mid-1980s with Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the Soviet Union, Perestroika was a defining political and cultural moment in Russian and world history. Bringing together new personal freedoms and neoliberal conservativism, Perestroika allowed a wide range of artistic practices to emerge. While politically it was a messy period, the arrival of neoliberal capitalism allowed for a burst of creativity and energy and opened communication channels with the West.78 Previously secretive and shared only in confidence among one’s peer group, Russian unofficial art started to openly play with Soviet iconography. Moreover, the artists gathered around Timur Novikov in St Petersburg not only embraced art but also played in rock bands, designed sets and costumes for theatre and rock concerts, shot artistic, digitally enhanced films, ran an unofficial TV channel/pirate TV, organized the first raves in the Soviet Union, engaged with fashion design, and played with gender fluidity.79 In the late 1980s, the similar lifestyle tendencies were also present in Moscow, with the first Moscow alternative fashion designers, such as Katya Filippova and Katya Mossina, appearing at informal youth gatherings called Tusovka and their world of rock musicians, artists, and 78

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For an overview of the society and culture in the late Soviet period, see, for example, Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). For an overview, see Ekaterina Andreeva, Club of Friends: Timur Novikov’s New Artists and New Academy (London: Calvert 22 Foundation, 2014); Ivor Stodolsky, ‘Cultural Geopolitics in the New Russian Cultural Intelligentsia: A Case Study of Timur Novikov, Artist and Cultural Ideologue, 1958–2002’, in Wanda Dressler (ed.), Eurasie: Espace Mythique ou Réalité en Construction? (Brussels: Bruylant, 2009), 287–320.

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filmmakers.80 Filippova and Mossina offered their young customers an ironic but colourful sartorial reading of the Russian Soviet era. Their loud and ‘trashy’ style stood in total opposition to the concept of socialist fashion. By transgressing the old, they announced the new times that would bring modern and diversified dress codes in the 1990s. In a country that was falling apart, there was not too much state control over the Soviet late 1980s alternative designers and musicians and their activities that mostly took place in abandoned or unoccupied apartments. In the 1980s, an alternative fashion scene also existed in East Germany, both as an unofficial exaggerated aesthetic, contrasting the conventionality of the official socialist dress, and as an unofficial retail outlet that took place at flea-market stalls.81 Two wellknown avant-garde groups – Chic, Charmant und Dauerhaft (Chic, Charming and Durable) and Allerleirauh (All Kinds of Fur) – successfully sold their extravagant handmade clothes to those bored with the prevailing greyness, and became famous for staging their Otherness at the excessively elaborate events that combined apocalyptic party, surreal theatre, and wild street performance. Taking place at abandoned churches and decommissioned bathhouses, but also in shop windows, their voluminous and colourful custom-made outfits took the phenomenon of couture to a radically new level. In their improvised workshops, they sewed, knitted, or glued their dresses from shower curtains, hospital intestine bags, plastic foil that farmers used to protect their strawberry fields, and other materials that would have never been 80

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For an overview, see Hilary Pilkington, ‘Farewell to the Tusovka: Masculinities and Femininities on the Moscow Youth Scene’, in Hilary Pilkington (ed.), Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia (London: Routledge, 1996), 236–63; Irina Sirotkina, ‘Costume as Truth and as a New Mythology: Dressed Performances of Perestroika’, Fashion Theory, 22/2 (2018), 199–217. For an extensive overview of the East German alternative fashion scene, see Andrea Prause, Catwalk wider den Sozialismus: Die alternative Modeszene der DDR in den 1980er Jahren (Berlin: be.bra wissenschaft verlag, 2018). Berlin’s Museum of Applied Arts organized the exhibition ‘Free Within Borders’ in 2009, while Marco Wilms, one of the participants in those events, co-produced and directed the film Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie (A Dream Wrapped in Strawberry Foil, translated in English as Comrade Couture), also released in 2009.

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used in couture proper. For alternative designers such as Sabine von Oettingen (b. 1962) from Chic, Charmant und Dauerhaft, such unconventional materials were not just a necessity but also a challenge to be creative under unfavourable circumstances. The gender-fluid member from the same alternative group, the stylist Frank Schäfer (b. 1959) would occasionally get arrested at the East Berlin’s central square Alexanderplatz for wearing a glitter spray in his hair. Intermittently, the secret police, the Stasi, would focus on some of the participants, making their life very difficult. Otherwise, Stasi agents attended those performances, markedly different in their standardized Dederon suits from the flamboyantly dressed audience. But, by the late 1980s, the regime had already been so weakened that it could not engage in serious persecutions. The late Soviet and East German alternative fashions did not politically challenge the socialist system. But their individualistic, hedonistic, stylistically exaggerated and gender-fluid collections could have been even more dangerous for those already seriously compromised systems. Certainly, the young people engaging in those alternative sartorial and musical activities did so only because not even ordinary citizens believed in the ideals and rules that their respective regimes had imposed on them for too long. Yet, those young people were brave and creative enough to express their thoughts and imagination in ways previously unseen in their respective countries. For this, unofficial spaces and the fragmented, unpredictable concept of time served them well.

conclusion Distinguishing between three socialist sartorial fashion phenomena – socialist official fashion, everyday fashion, and alternative fashion – this chapter argues that they were embedded in different spheres of socialist societies and served by different concepts of time. In its official version fashion was embedded in the socialist mythical reality, both as a part of the centralized economy and its Five-Year Plans, and as an image of conventional yet unachievable elegance, obeying in this sense the aesthetics of Socialist Realism. Moreover, such bureaucratic over-centralization was not only in

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line with the prevailing economic model, but also demonstrated the socialist fear of change and discontinuity of time. Preferring the synchronic, systematic level over the diachronic, processive level, subsequent regimes attempted to control and tame fashion trends through centralized systems of clothes production and distribution. But the very existence of socialist official fashion, manifested through the regimes’ huge efforts to maintain it through its central fashion institutions, and promote it through their women’s magazines, showed the socialist system’s deep anxieties about the phenomenon of fashion. In the end, all the distortions that would haunt socialist fashion till the very end of socialism were already inscribed in the first embodiment of socialist fashion conceived in the Soviet Dom modelei in the mid-1930s: various hierarchically imposed levels of decision-making, an obsession with science, a confused relationship with Western fashion, a lack of tradition and experience, a misrepresentation of an ideal prototype as an average mass-produced garment, and an isolationism relying on the ethnic heritage. Both privileges for the few and clothes shortages persisted, as the state continued to act as an allocator of goods in an inefficient centrally organized field of fashion production. In contrast, everyday fashion was partially embedded in an unofficial modernity that ran in parallel with the official modernity and became increasingly more important from the late 1950s on. The weakening of ideological pressures, following Khrushchev’s rise to power, also promoted a new official aesthetics – socialist good taste, which united socialist ideals of modesty and simplicity with two ‘bourgeois’ categories: prettiness and elegance. The new official style was accompanied by a reconceptualization of gender, which promoted conventional femininity, presenting a new, softer, and sophisticated face of socialism against the backdrop of the Cold War. Moreover, both socialist good taste and a new female ideal responded to the need to dress up the new middle classes and gratify their increasing interest in fashion. Everyday fashion existed in a fluid space in which the official, the informal, and the illegal were equally present. It could be obtained at state ateliers which offered custom-made dresses, acquired through the prohibited services of a seamstress, or sewn by oneself.

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In contrast to the concept of timelessness which defined socialist official fashion, everyday fashion acknowledged change and was served by a faster flow of time. However, fashionability had been controlled and tamed, unless fashionable dresses were produced in an unofficial arena. Everyday fashion nevertheless showed the ongoing negotiations between the socialist regimes and their female populations, especially expressed through the regular advice columns that acknowledged the interest in fashion but communicated to their readership that their fashion dreams could be achieved by do-it-yourself. Furthermore, socialist official fashion was served by the elitist magazines, while everyday fashion was either dealt with in the popular media or informed by Western fashion magazines. Alternative fashions appeared in the late 1980s and became prominent in the Soviet Union and East Germany. While they did not politically challenge socialism, their designers nevertheless threatened the already weakened systems with their extravagant styles and their individualistic and hedonistic world view. Moreover, in contrast to the strictly controlled and slow master narrative of the official fashion, the presentations of alternative fashion designers took place in unofficial spaces, and their models paraded to the beat of a speedy and fragmented concept of time.

select bibliography Bartlett, Djurdja, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Bartlett, Djurdja, ‘Stars on Screen and Red Carpet’, in Birgit Beumers (ed.), A Companion to Russian Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 337–63. Betts, Paul, ‘The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture’, Journal of Modern History, 72/3 (2000), 731–65. Gerasimova, E. and S. Chuikina, ‘Obshchestvo remonta’ [The Repair Society], NZ, 34 (2004, electronic version). Gronow, Jukka and Sergey Zhuravlev, Fashion Meets Socialism: Fashion Industry in the Soviet Union after the Second World War (Helsinki: SKS [Studia Fennica Historica], 2016). Hankiss, Elemér, East European Alternatives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

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the totalitarian state and fashion Hlaváč ková, Konstantina, Czech Fashion 1940–1970: Mirror of the Times (Prague: u(p)m and Olympia Publishing, 2000). Jowitt, Ken, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Köpp, Ulrike, ‘Heinz Bormann – der Dior der DDR’, UTOPIE kreativ, 123 (2001), 42–51. Kornai, Janos, Vision and Reality, Market and State: Contradictions and Dilemmas Revisited (Budapest: Corvina, 1990). Kowalska, Joanna and Małgorzata Moż dż yń ska-Nawotka, Fashionable in Communist Poland (Cracow: National Museum and Wroclaw: National Museum, 2016). Pilkington, Hilary, ‘Farewell to the Tusovka: Masculinities and Femininities on the Moscow Youth Scene’, in Hilary Pilkington (ed.), Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia (London: Routledge, 1996), 236–63. Prause, Andrea, Catwalk wider den Sozialismus: Die alternative Modeszene der DDR in den 1980er Jahren (Berlin: be.bra wissenschaft verlag, 2018). Róż yc, Marcin, Paulina Latham, and Beata Dudzic, Chrysalis (London: Polish Cultural Institute in London, Pola Arts Foundation, 2016). Rzechorzek, Ewa, Moda Polska Warszawa (Warsaw: PWN SA, 2018). Simonovics, Ildikó, Rothschild Klára: a vörös divatkirálynő [Klára Rothschild: The Red Fashion Queen] (Budapest: Jaffa Kiadó, 2019). Stitziel, Judd, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics and Consumer Culture in East Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2005). Stokes, Raymond G., ‘Plastics and the New Society: The German Democratic Republic in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (eds.), Style and Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 65–80. Tarasova, Nina and Yulia Popova, Viacheslav Zaitsev v Ermitazhe [Viacheslav Zaitsev at the Hermitage] (St Petersburg: The State Hermitage Museum, 2016). Uchalová, Eva (ed.), Prague Fashion Houses, 1900–1948 (Prague: Museum of Decorative Arts, 2011). Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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HOLLYWOOD AND BEYOND Fashion and the Fiction Film stella bruzzi

The significant and enduring interrelationship between fashion and film is ‘a force as old as film itself’;1 it remains an enduring truism that cinema reflects the fashions of its age but also that it has dictated and inspired fashion. The story of this relationship invariably starts with and centres on Hollywood, a globally dominant force since cinema’s earliest days, and although this chapter will look beyond Hollywood (especially when it comes to more recent decades), it will follow suit for, as surrealist fashion (and occasional costume) designer Elsa Schiaparelli once declared: ‘what Hollywood designs today, you will be wearing tomorrow’.2 From early examinations of clothes in film (such as Elizabeth Leese’s Costume Design in the Movies from 1976, a fabulous anecdotal compilation of random facts about costume and fashion in film) the rich but fragmented and at times elusive story of fashion and the fiction film has overwhelmingly prioritized Hollywood productions. Leese is not alone; despite its wider, more generic title, Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (edited by Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, 1990) deals exclusively with US and Hollywood examples; in more recent publications such as Adrienne Munich’s edited collection Fashion in Film (2011) Hollywood is certainly sometimes placed in a broader context I would like to thank Professor Rosie Thomas for her advice on Bollywood and fashion. 1 Adrienne Munich, ‘Introduction: Fashion Shows’, in Adrienne Munich (ed.), Fashion in Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 1. 2 Claire Haggard, ‘Dressing up in Public’, Screen International MIFED Issue/20 (September 1990), 6.

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while still remaining dominant. Similarly, Amber Butchart’s 2016 The Fashion of Film: How Cinema Has Inspired Fashion, for example, culls its historical illustrations of cinema’s inspirational appeal largely from Hollywood/US case studies. That the ‘synchronicity between the fashion and film industries thrived during the Golden Age of Hollywood’, as Butchart observes, was in part because the big studios appreciated the importance, in fashion terms, of the continental European fashion industry, using many of Europe’s top designers from Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel to Giorgio Armani and Miuccia Prada.3 In spite of their natural affinity, there is no straightforward way to define the synergy between, as Eugenia Paulicelli frames it, ‘two of the most popular and widespread commercial industries to grow out of modernity’.4 The history of the interrelationship between fashion and the fiction film comprises many things such as: the work of individual designers; partnerships with especially influential stars; landmark fashion moments; stand-out costumes; films about fashion; the adoption of popular accessories. What follows below is, as such, more of a journey through some of what Carolyn Steedman called ‘History as stuff’,5 the rifling through objects and details that sprawl and spread, than a causal ‘history’ guided by chronology.

early european designers in hollywood: 1910–1932 Fashion has featured in and informed cinema since its inception, most notably fashions from Europe. The year 1910, for instance, saw the release of a very early fashion film, Fifty Years of Paris Fashions, 1859–1909, while in 1911 the All British Fashion Exhibition at Kensington Gore was recorded as newsreel companies Pathé and Gaumont both produced series of short preview films dedicated to forthcoming fashions, coverage that continued until 3

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Amber Butchart, The Fashion of Film: How Cinema Has Inspired Fashion (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2016), 7. Eugenia Paulicelli, ‘Reframing History: Federico Fellini’s Rome, Fashion and Costume’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, 8/1 (2019), 72. Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 67.

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the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. From its earliest years, cinema’s influence on fashion was clear: after the release of The Sheik (George Melford, 1921), its star, Rudolph Valentino, started a craze for slave bracelets. However, there is a sense that the frivolity and cost of fashion was not always appreciated, and in 1922 Erich von Stroheim found himself relieved of his duties as costume designer for Merry-Go-Round (which he was also directing) for blowing a substantial part of the budget on silk underpants for the Guardsman extras. While much of the history of fashion’s interaction with cinema is performative and spectacular, von Stroheim’s exaggerated act of sprezzatura (studied carelessness) draws attention to the subtleties, as, decades later, did Robert de Niro’s insistence when making The Untouchables (Brian de Palma, 1987) that actors be provided not just with suits made by the gangster’s original tailors, but also with the same silk underwear. Fashion, even in cinema, is not always to be seen. Two European couturiers associated with Hollywood’s early era were Parisian womenswear designer Paul Poiret, and Italian shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo. Poiret, who had left Worth to establish his own house in 1903, was a radical who dispensed with both the petticoat and the corset and became famed for his luxurious, exotically inspired, loose-fitting designs. He dressed Sarah Bernhardt in the 1912 costume drama Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth (Louis Mercanton and Henri Desfontaine) and went on to make several fashion shorts. Ferragamo emigrated from southern Italy in 1914, moving from Boston to California where he opened a store in Santa Barbara before being hired to make boots for Westerns produced by the American Film Company, and to work on D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920) and later Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923), James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon (1923), and Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Ferragamo became shoemaker to the stars, including Pola Negri, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, and Rudolph Valentino. Ferragamo returned to Italy in 1927, but his fashions (especially his legendary shoes) continued to be worn by film stars (Marilyn Monroe among them) on and off the screen. The year of the Wall Street stock market crash – 1929 – was, in fashion terms, the year in which the Parisian Jean Patou caused

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a sensation by dropping hemlines. Overnight, cinema’s shorterskirted Flappers (such as the dangerously seductive Louise Brooks in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929)) became conspicuously démodé. Cinema had been caught out. In an attempt not to be caught out again, the Hollywood studios determined they must lead rather than imitate trends, and a period of design domination ensued that led Coco Chanel to be enticed from Paris to the MGM studio by its chief, Samuel Goldwyn. In receipt of a lucrative $1 million contract, the uncompromising Chanel only designed three feature films between 1931 and 1932 – Tonight or Never, Palmy Days, and The Greeks Had a Word for Them – before returning abruptly to Paris. The Gloria Swanson vehicle, Tonight or Never, was the only one of this trio for which Chanel received an on-screen credit (though such marginalization of fashion was not uncommon). Chanel returned to France and, following the war, relaunched her company in 1954, designing costumes for a handful of nouvelle vague films including Les Amants (Louis Malle, 1958) and Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), for which she made Delphine Seyrig’s wardrobe, including a black chiffon and satin sleeveless dress now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Even if Chanel’s early film designs have not endured in the memory, the story is very different when it comes to Josef von Sternberg’s contemporaneous film, Morocco (1930), in which Marlene Dietrich plays cabaret singer Amy Jolly, dressed in an ensemble of black tails, waistcoat, dress shirt, and sprung top hat designed by Travis Banton. Von Sternberg flaunts and revels in his star’s eroticized androgyny (Figure 26.1). Morocco’s fetishization of Dietrich’s multi-faceted persona proved to be an enduring icon if one looks ahead to the languid dandy-ish sensuality of Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘le smoking’ tuxedo suit for women, first aired in 1966 and subsequently immortalized in Helmut Newton’s atmospheric monochrome 1975 photograph for Vogue Paris of Vibeke Knudsen in her exquisitely tailored ‘man-woman’ suit.6 The eroticism of Dietrich’s androgyny transcended Morocco and was, as 6

In the Christie’s catalogue entry for the sale of the twin photograph of Vibeke adopting the same pose but with a naked mannequin behind her Newton comments: ‘The idea was a man-woman standing in a street at

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Figure 26.1 Marlene Dietrich in the film Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930). Photo by Donaldson Collection / Getty Images.

exemplified by YSL’s reinvention of it, effortlessly timeless. Hollywood continued to appreciate the appeal of the female star in masculine attire, epitomized by Katherine Hepburn sporting peg-topped trousers in Christopher Strong (Dorothy Arzner, 1933).7

some early examples of film’s influence on fashion: 1932–1939 Far more conventional than Dietrich’s seminal appearance in Morocco but just as influential in fashion terms was Joan Crawford’s appearance in Letty Lynton (Clarence Brown, 1932), specifically in the infamous Gilbert Adrian fluffy, white creation with the ruffled organdie sleeves, reputedly the first on-screen

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night’, www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/helmut-newton-1920-2004-rueaubriot-paris-4893166-details.aspx (accessed 18 October 2020). Subsequent examples include Audrey Hepburn in Gregory Peck’s pyjamas in Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) and a man’s dress shirt in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961) or Jean Seberg with her elfin hair wearing a man’s shirt in Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960). Then, of course, there was Diane Keaton in the 1970s (see later in this chapter).

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Figure 26.2 Joan Crawford in Letty Lynton (Clarence Brown, 1932). Photo by George Hurrell / John Kobal Foundation / Getty Images.

fashion item to be widely copied and sold across the United States (Figure 26.2).8 This most famous of Adrian’s Letty Lynton dresses crystallizes the notion of cinema costume as aspirational but attainable fashion, a welcome distraction no doubt through the Great Depression. In an era when the majority of women could sew and knit, female spectators often borrowed fashion tips from the movies and Crawford’s look was reproduced in numerous stores and catalogues across the Unites States in the 1930s, with copycat sleeves featuring in Sears catalogues, pattern books, and advertisements. ‘The first time I became conscious of the terrific power of the movies’, the dress’s designer, Adrian, remarked, was in 8

Cf. ‘The Letty Lynton Dress’, https://witness2fashion.wordpress.com/2016/ 02/17/the-letty-lynton-dress-adrian-and-joan-crawfords-shoulders-part-1/ (accessed 8 October 2020).

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New York ‘and found that everyone was talking about the Letty Lynton dress’,9 quite possibly purchased from Macy’s which alone sold more than 50,000. Fleetingly, her ardent fans could become Joan Crawford; as Entwistle posits, ‘fashion opens up possibilities for framing the self, however temporarily’.10 Yet, the phenomenon of the single costume item that goes ‘viral’, goes beyond the star system, continuing the tradition of Elsa Schiaparelli’s observation from the 1930s about how frequently spectators copied and emulated Hollywood fashions. In 1937 Schiaparelli designed Mae West’s costumes for Every Day’s a Holiday and launched her fragrance, Shocking, whose curvaceous bottle had been modelled on a life-size plaster model of the actress as the Venus de Milo that West had sent to Paris. The star persona sells and shapes fashion. There is something undeniably wholesome about the Letty Lynton look. Conversely, Jean Harlow’s beaded dinner dress in Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, 1933) was altogether sexier and followed Madame Vionnet’s introduction in 1929 of the bias-cut dress, a style keenly absorbed by Hollywood costume designers who made the flowing, diagonally-cut evening gown into shorthand for on-screen glamour throughout the 1930s. Harlow’s most notable costume in Dinner at Eight makes its entrance as guests discuss Florida and the sun. The vogue for cutting evening dresses low at the back like Harlow’s originated in Hollywood because it enhanced a star’s sensuality without violating the prescriptive Motion Picture Production Code guidelines on cleavage exposure. Another film that stayed just the right side of censorship was It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), in which Clark Gable appeared bare chested, leading to catastrophic drops in sales of men’s vests across the United States.11 Sales of male undergarments only recovered after the Second World War and the arrival 9 10

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Ibid. Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 139. Cliff Alperti undertook some assiduous archival research and quotes from several local newspapers reporting drops in sales of male undershirts of between 40 per cent and 80 per cent following Gable’s lead. Cf. ‘Did Clark Gable Kill the Undershirt?’, Immortal Ephemera, 26 August 2013, https:// immortalephemera.com/42243/did-clark-gable-kill-the-undershirt/ (accessed 18 October 2020).

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of the GI’s white t-shirt, a garment resonant with male virility as exemplified by Marlon Brando in The Men (Fred Zinnemann, 1950) who, despite having been paralysed in combat, flaunts his muscular frame in a tight white t-shirt whether seated in a wheelchair or in rehabilitation, teaching himself to walk again. An indication of how explicitly gendered the history of film and fashion traditionally has been is Gable’s 1935 contract with his studio, MGM, which stipulated that he had to provide his own wardrobe for any contemporary films, common practice for male stars and interesting in terms of what it says about the male star’s ‘real’ identity. Cary Grant maintained a keen interest in fashion and, in 1932, with his close friend Wright Neale, he opened the shortlived menswear store on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles: Neale’s Smart Men’s Apparel. Grant became the only actor to whom notoriously controlling director Alfred Hitchcock would entrust his wardrobe. Much later, in To Catch a Thief (1954), Grant (who went shopping throughout filming in the south of France with co-star Grace Kelly for costume items to perfectly complement hers) locally sourced the striped round-neck jumper and red polka dot foulard he put with his pleated grey trousers from Maxwell’s on Dover Street, London, for when the police arrive at his villa. ‘The same kind of clothes’, he revealed, as ‘I wear offscreen.’12

the war decade: 1939–1949 The 1939–45 war, like its predecessor of 1914–18, was a period of austerity, brought to an abrupt and spectacularly tumultuous end (in fashion terms) by Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’, launched in 1947 as part of his inaugural collection. The rounded shoulders, cinched waist, and voluminous skirt celebrated femininity and opulence and became a film staple throughout the latter 1940s and 1950s. The design was also profoundly aspirational and flagrantly defied the ‘make do and mend’ mentality of utility wear and dresses made from parachute silk that still predominated in Europe, where clothes and fabric rationing was in place until the 12

Quoted in ‘When the Man Dresses the Character: Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief’, classiq.me, https://classiq.me/when-the-man-dresses-thecharacter-cary-grant-in-to-catch-a-thief (accessed 24 October 2020).

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end of the decade or beyond.13 The advent of the New Look was another key moment in cinema’s relationship with fashion, signalling how easy it was for film to be tripped up by fashion innovation. As Hollywood’s most lauded and eminent costume designer, Edith Head, reflected later, she learned her lesson ‘the hard way’ after Dior’s 1947 launch. In the era of clothes rationing, ‘Every film that I had done in the past few months looked like something from the bread lines’, she mused; ‘I vowed that I would never get caught by a fashion trend again.’14 Films continued to be important through the Second World War years as all the European wartime leaders – Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini – were, for instance, notable cinephiles. But, with few exceptions such as the opulently costumed and designed Gone with the Wind (1939), films generally mirrored the austerity beyond, as illustrated by Head’s own designs for many of Hollywood’s female stars: Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels (1941); Barbara Stanwyck, in films such as Double Indemnity (1944); and Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark (1944). Irene’s uncredited costuming of Rebecca (1940) or Milo Anderson’s creation of Joan Crawford’s functional and subdued clothes for Mildred Pierce (1945) epitomized the times. And yet, even on the rebound from austerity, it was not exclusively the case that film costume never influenced fashion, as illustrated by the popularity of Dorothy Lamour’s sarong dress. As Lamour’s identity became inextricably entwined (over only eight movies) with the sarong, from The Jungle Princess (Wilhelm Thiele, 1936) in which she played a Malaysian native or The Hurricane (John Ford, 1937) when she appears as a Polynesian islander, so the style had a huge effect on the US fashion pages between 1936 and 1949. Lamour’s sarongs through the early 1940s particularly resonated with the war in the Pacific against Japan. Archival examples abound of patterns for sarong dresses and beachwear sold by McCall’s, Simplicity, and Hollywood Pattern, frequently accessorized with hair ribbons or Polynesian double flowers. The sarong-style skirt endured in the United States well beyond 1949 when Lamour asked

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Clothes rationing ended in Britain in 1949, for instance. Edith Head (with Paddy Calistro), Edith Head’s Hollywood (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983), 69–70.

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her fans for advice about whether or not to continue making sarong pictures.

the 1950s: the era of givenchy and the teenager The 1950s proved a significant decade for film and fashion. Though the innovation of Dior’s New Look had had a traumatic effect on Hollywood, it swiftly came to be adopted as the silhouette for not just sophistication and luxury (as it is in the first scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) when Grace Kelly visits the invalided James Stewart in a spectacular Edith Head black-andwhite gown) but also for conventional femininity. Having remarked of the New Look that ‘there was a weird masculinity about it all’, Elizabeth Wilson links Dior’s innovation to Simone de Beauvoir’s idea of the ‘bondage of elegance’,15 a notion that finds an echo in Hollywood’s championing of the (by the mid-1950s, ubiquitous and conventionalized) New Look, for the domestic, home-bound woman. A younger version of the New Look was the off-theshoulder, violet-encrusted ball gown that Head (Hollywood’s most celebrated costume designer) designed for Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951). One report refers to seventeen replicas at one party, while Head on occasion inflated the number to thirty-seven.16 But there was a 1950s female alternative in the form of Audrey Hepburn, whose friendship with and championing of young French couturier Hubert de Givenchy is where the story of the links between fashion and film (too frequently) begins and ends. This collaboration did more to elevate fashion and concomitantly to devalue costume than any other. In both Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954) and Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957), one of the most significant films about fashion, Hepburn’s characters go to Paris and acquire multiple glamourous outfits – designed by Givenchy. Edith Head was left to design Hepburn’s steadfastly ordinary, pretransformation clothes, a division of labour that, as the costume 15

16

Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003 [1985]), 46 and 125. Head, Edith Head’s Hollywood, 97–8.

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designer noted, broke her heart. Hepburn’s Givenchy wardrobes are exquisite, such as the heavily embroidered ‘lovely dress with yards of skirt – way off the shoulders’ (as her character describes it) she wears to a ball on her return from Paris in Sabrina; however, they also, paradoxically, exposed the superficiality and brittleness of fashion, most poignantly in Funny Face, in which Hepburn becomes a model by accident. Often seen only as a film in love with fashion, it is deeply ironic that the warmest, most enticing fashion moment comes when Hepburn, on an evening off, performs an expressive dance in a club dressed very simply in black capris, flats, and polo-neck. As if picking up on this tacit championing of the ordinary, the male teen fashions of the 1950s commonly signalled independence, free will, and rebellion. One of the most enduringly iconic fashion items of 1950s cinema was James Dean’s red ‘Harrington’ jacket in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), worn over an equally iconic white t-shirt. Dean’s red nylon windbreaker was the classic G9 jacket by British firm Baracuta, founded in Manchester in 1937 by James and Isaac Miller. With the G9, Baracuta ‘set out to create a functional rainproof jacket for the English working man’,17 but one which, after they started exporting it to United States in 1950, became first a staple among golfers and subsequently (and slightly implausibly, perhaps) beloved by US stars. Elvis Presley wore a pale G9 in King Creole (1958). Steve McQueen wore the ‘Harrington’18 regularly both on- and offscreen – for instance he wore a natural-coloured blouson G9 astride a motorbike for the cover of LIFE magazine on 12 July 1963 and later in The Thomas Crown Affair (Norman Jewison, 1968). Male screen icons such as Dean, McQueen, and Frank Sinatra, who donned another cream Baracuta in Assault on a Queen (1966), ensured that the G9 became synonymous with casual masculine cool. The jacket continues to feature prominently on action heroes, from Christopher Reeve as Superman (1978) to Armie Hammer in 17

18

Benedict Browne, ‘Style 101: The Harrington Jacket’, The Rake, https://therake .com/stories/style/style-101-the-harrington-jacket/ (accessed 6 October 2020). The Baracuta jacket only became known as the ‘Harrington’ after the character Rodney Harrington (played by Ryan O’Neal) appeared in the longrunning soap opera, Peyton Place (1964–9).

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Figure 26.3

James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955). Photo by Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015). James Dean’s red G9 in Rebel became a particularly potent symbol of teenage rebellion and the combination of the vivid red of the jacket and the white t-shirt underneath an equally strong shorthand for untameable masculinity (Figure 26.3).

the 1960s: the european influence and the arrival of ready to wear fashion Sexual intercourse, poet Philip Larkin wrote, ‘began in nineteen sixty-three . . . Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban / And the Beatles’ first LP’,19 and 1960s fashion broadly speaking followed suit, though in fashion terms both Last Year in Marienbad and La Dolce Vita (1960) had proved influential. As art director, costume and set designer, Piero Gherardi defined the overall look of La Dolce Vita, which did much to establish Italian style in film (though building on relationships such as that between the Romebased couture duo, the Fontana sisters, and classical Hollywood star Ava Gardner). Anita Ekberg wore the sensuous and voluptuous 19

Philip Larkin, ‘Annus Mirabilis’, www.wussu.com/poems/plam.htm (accessed 30 October 2020).

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Fontana sisters’ black dress for cavorting in the Trevi fountain and is the film’s knock-out clothing item. But it is arguably for Gherardi’s honing of Marcello Mastroianni’s Latin Lover look that the film should be remembered: the Persol shades he wears indoors and out, his single-breasted suits and slim ties. The differentiation between costume and fashion (converging around nebulous notions of style) became increasingly blurred as, in cinema at least, unique, high-end designs gave way to more readily available prêt-a-porter, represented by Jocelyn Richards’ quintessentially ‘swinging London’ costumes for The Knack . . . and How to Get It (Richard Lester, 1965), Vanessa Redgrave in Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), and Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger, 1971). The prominence afforded to street style in these 1960s films altered slightly the relationship between audience and on-screen clothes: these were clothes fashionable Londoners might actually wear themselves. In Stanley Donan’s romantic comedy Two for the Road (1967), Audrey Hepburn dons Ken Scott, Michele Rosier, Mary Quant, and Foale and Tuffin, as well as a Paco Rabanne disc dress, all set off by her Louis Vuitton bag, while her opposite number, Albert Finney, was clad, more homogeneously, in Hardy Amies. The connections between Amies, Rabanne, costumes, and the space age resonantly draw together some of the complexities of 1960s film fashions. Amies, since 1950 the late Queen Elizabeth’s favourite designer, saw off stiff competition to design the costumes for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), while Rabanne (credited as Rabane) inspired the costuming of Barbarella (Roger Vadim, 1968) and contributed Jane Fonda’s final green dress and matching boots.20 Whereas Amies’ futuristic vision is disconcertingly unspectacular at times (the spaceman father’s brown suit being a case in point), Rabanne’s remains ravishingly and fetishistically conspicuous. 20

There is controversy about Rabanne’s involvement with Barbarella. Cf. Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén, ‘Barbarella’s Wardrobe: Exploring Jacques Fonteray’s Intergalactic Runway’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, 5/2 (2016), 185–211. Though often credited with having designed the costumes for the film, Rabanne was only responsible for the design of one costume. The remainder were the work of Jacques Fonteray.

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Italian designer Nino Cerruti’s first foray into film was to design Faye Dunaway’s retro hats in Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), one of the most stylistically influential films of the decade. Going against the ubiquitous mini, for instance, Dunaway’s longer skirt ushered in the midi. To mark the film’s release, Dunaway appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine, dubbed ‘Fashion’s New Darling’. Whereas classical era femininity had been characterized by sensuous fabrics such as silk, feathers, and fashions that drew attention to its female stars’ corporeality, stars such as Dunaway, Redgrave, and Julie Christie popularized alternative images of feminine fashion. Christie’s look in Dr Zhivago (1965) was another that resonated immediately with audiences and was mimicked and echoed in magazine spreads, fashion collections, and store windows. In its own way, the look created for Christie by Phyllis Dalton was spectacular and arresting. Chanel famously determined, ‘Le Scheherazade c’est facile. Une petit robe noir c’est difficile’;21 following in her footsteps, one quintessential example of this alternative fashioning of femininity is proffered by the obdurately unsensuous (but no less fetishistic) outfits designed by fellow-Parisian couturier, Yves Saint Laurent, for his muse Catherine Deneuve in Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967). Not unlike Chanel, Saint Laurent created some only indirectly spectacular collections; Deneuve in Belle de jour – in the low-slung patent court shoes, inconspicuous black coat and beige slip dress she wears when she first ventures into the high-class brothel in which she ends up working – models an archetypal mid-1960s YSL ‘capsule wardrobe’. With films such as Darling, 2001 and Belle de jour, the centre of gravity started definitively to shift away from Hollywood.

the 1970s: race, street style, and nostalgia One of the biggest young male film stars of the 1950s and 1960s was Sidney Poitier, the first African American actor to gain enduring prominence in Hollywood (Figure 26.4). From his debut in No Way 21

‘Scheherazade is easy; it’s the little black dress that’s difficult.’ Quoted in Ernestine Carter, Magic Names of Fashion (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), 56.

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Figure 26.4 Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967). Photo by United Artists / Getty Images.

Out (1950) to later films such as In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), Poitier largely projected a classically formal masculine wool jacket, shirt, and tie. Taking its lead from Poitier’s pre-eminence, 1971 proved a watershed moment for Black screen fashion, with the virtually simultaneous release of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin van Peebles) and Shaft (Gordon Parks), two pictures that began the wave of low-budget, financially successful,22 but equivocally received Black action ‘Blaxploitation’ movies. Blaxploitation films were distinctive for their fetishization of Black urban clothes; 22

Shaft grossed $12 million in its first year, while a year later, Parks’ Super Fly made $11 million in its first two months.

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Figure 26.5

Pam Grier in Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974). Photo by LMPC via Getty Images.

male heroes such as private detective Shaft (in black leather coat and polo jumpers) or cocaine dealer Youngblood Priest (in Super Fly, 1972) over-identified with what they wore, while Pam Grier’s unrelentingly titillating clothes coupled with her big afro hair in Jack Hill’s Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) made her a flawed and complex expression of African American visibility (Figure 26.5). Clothes were a prominent additional character, created by designers such as Ruth West, given a separate costume credit for Grier’s outfits in Foxy Brown. From her store in Hollywood, West helped define the looks of numerous Black stars (on- and off-screen) of the 1970s: Janet Jackson; Bill Griffin of the Miracles; Gerald Brown of the Soul Train Gang.23 The films’ plots (centred on pimps, pushers, and vigilantes) reinforced stereotypes, and their regressive portrayals of African American women (in 23

Cf. ‘Name It, She’ll Make It’, Ebony, May 1977, https://books.google.co.uk/ books?id=1ssDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA66&dq=ruth+west&hl=en&sa=X&redi r_esc=y#v=onepage&q=ruth%20west&f=false (accessed 25 October 2020).

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their fur, tight jeans, and clinging, low-cut tops) drew frequent criticism. However, many of the street styles endured and recurred: most explicitly in John Singleton’s remake of Shaft (2000) with Samuel L. Jackson in the title role (his coat longer and more flamboyant than his predecessor’s) but also in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), in which Grier is cast as a beautiful middleaged homage to her Blaxploitation self. Conversely, white film fashion in the 1970s was epitomized by Ralph Lauren, whose key excursions into film costuming were: The Great Gatsby (Jack Clayton, 1974), Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), and the later Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985). It remains quite remarkable how influential (for instance in the pages of Vogue) the first two of these were. Edith Head once referred to her costumes as ‘middle of the road’;24 Lauren represented the middle of the road high-end fashion, which might go some way towards explaining his popularity as a costumer, although the provenance of the Gatsby ‘look’ has been hotly and entertainingly disputed. Costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge objected when Lauren ‘thought he should have won an Oscar for loaning me a dozen shirts!’, while Lauren supporters argued that ‘Ralph was doing Gatsby way before the movie’.25 In reality, Redford’s waistcoated style chimed readily with Lauren’s mid-1970s collections while the film, more broadly, launched a Jazz Age trend. Pointedly, Lauren’s 2012 collection (coinciding with Baz Luhrmann’s remake of Fitzgerald’s novel) explicitly harks back to the same era. Similarly, Annie Hall’s indebtedness to Lauren has been debated. Certainly, some of Diane Keaton’s signature items (the tie, the tuxedo) and some of Woody Allen’s costumes are Lauren’s, but in this instance costume designer Ruth Morley stressed that Annie Hall’s quintessentially eclectic look of oversized masculine jackets, waistcoats, and voluminous hats was ‘pure Diane Keaton’.26 This is corroborated by Keaton herself when she recalls Allen’s 24 25

26

Head, Edith Head’s Hollywood, 97. Highsnobiety, ‘Second Look: Ralph Lauren and The Great Gatsby Embellishment’, www.highsnobiety.com/p/ralph-lauren-great-gatsbyembellishment/ (accessed 17 October 2020). Classiq, ‘Diane Keaton: The Real Look Behind Annie Hall’ (2018), https://classiq .me/diane-keaton-the-real-look-behind-annie-hall (accessed 10 October 2020).

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directive to ‘Wear what you want to wear’, which led her to emulate the ‘cool-looking women on the streets of SoHo’ and incorporate a hat she had stolen from the set of Godfather II.27 Keaton’s control of her look highlights another fundamental issue in the history of fashion and film, namely that of ownership – this time not who designed a particular look, but rather the pre-eminence of the star. Like countless other teenagers and women in the late 1970s, I mimicked Annie Hall’s look and wore to death my grandfather’s three-piece suit, scarf, and bowler hat over my mother’s gorgeous purple silk shirt. But what were we paying our homages to? Keaton? Allen’s film? Ralph Lauren? Probably all and none of these. There is not necessarily a logical, causal link between a look, a film, and a fashion; clothes on- and off-screen feed on and emanate from each other. The swirl-patterned red and white Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress Cybill Shepherd wears as Betsy in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) is an immediately identifiable, stand-out garment of its time, entering into cinema as well as fashion history and emulated, decades later, in the authentically glamorous and vibrant retro designs for American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013). In that film Amy Adams wears three DVF wrap dresses – the first being the green and white collared twig design Diane von Furstenberg wore on the cover of Newsweek, 22 March 1976. Far less predictable was the enduring appeal of the ethereal Edwardian romanticism of the schoolgirls’ costumes in Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975). Weir’s adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel about female hysteria illustrates the symbolic power of the cult movie. The story of a fictional murder on St Valentine’s Day 1900, Picnic at Hanging Rock is a fetishistic costume feast which opens with a dreamy paean to the saint of romanticism: a montage of the nubile girls reading out their Valentine’s messages, gazing at themselves in mirrors and lacing each other firmly into their corsets (Figure 26.6). Inspired, it seems likely, by the dreamy, lacetrimmed, faux turn-of-the-century styles of Laura Ashley, Judith Dorsman’s costumes have inspired many later fashion collections 27

Quoted in Megan O’Grady, ‘Diane Keaton: The Big Picture’, Vogue, 20 October 2011.

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Figure 26.6 Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975). Photo by Film Publicity Archive / United Archives via Getty Images.

including: the cropped blazered look of Alexander McQueen, spring 2005; the long flowing gowns produced for Erdem, autumn 2010; and the delicate, diaphanous dresses Raf Simons produced for his swan song at Christian Dior, spring 2016. ‘I was thinking about the South of France’, Simons remarked, ‘and there’s a bit of Victoriana: something of that film Picnic at Hanging Rock. With a slight sexual undertone of darkness.’28

the 1980s: the ascendancy of giorgio armani and jean-paul gaultier Alongside Gable’s bare chest and Givenchy’s arrival in Hollywood, Giorgio Armani’s costuming of Richard Gere in American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980) has proved to be one of the key moments in cinema’s dialogue with fashion. There is hardly a more consummate advertisement for Armani’s trademark look of unstructured

28

Steff Yotka, ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock Is Back – This Is How 3 Top Designers Have Interpreted the Cult Film’, Vogue, 25 May 2018.

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suits and coordinated accessories than Schrader’s opening sequence in which male escort Julian Kaye (Gere), to the strains of Smokey Robinson, sashays over to his (bewilderingly well- and neatly-stocked) wardrobe and pulls out four loose jackets, shirts, and ties. The fetishizing gaze, so often reserved for women (as exemplified by the legs to head pan up a Givenchy-clad Audrey Hepburn when she first returns from Paris in Sabrina) here fixates on the neutral, earth-toned clothes on Julian’s bed. Roland Barthes could not ‘conceive of a garment without the body’, an impossibility he characterized as a ‘schizophrenic fantasy’,29 but embodied here is precisely Barthes’ destabilizing fantasy as fashion defines character. Armani redefined both male fashion and the role of the fashion designer in narrative film (frequently in tandem) and went on to design for a multitude of movies and provide or inspire the insouciant masculine spiviness captured in The Untouchables (1987), Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2008), and Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009). His clinical elegance has equally adorned women on-screen, especially those (such as Jodie Foster and Jessica Chastain) whom he dresses offscreen as well. Fellow Italian Nino Cerruti was an equally prolific costumer, most readily identified with formal menswear in 1990s films such as Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990), Bitter Moon (Roman Polanski, 1992), and Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993). Written into Cerruti’s film contracts was a clause stating that, at the end of filming, actors could keep his clothes, a canny publicity move that secured Cerruti one of the longest client lists in Hollywood. A radical alternative to the ubiquitous elegance of these Italian menswear giants is the contemporaneous work of French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, whose costume debut was Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) in which Helen Mirren wears a black cage dress – a sexy homage to the Victorian crinoline. Greenaway’s films, as here, are often structured as or around the notion of a procession, thereby echoing the catwalk. 29

Roland Barthes, ‘Erté, or À la lettre’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Essays on Music, Art and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 107.

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Concomitantly, Gaultier’s clothes – the trademark bodices, the yards of chiffon, the exaggeratedly elongated gloves, Mirren’s Marienbad-esque feather-trimmed cape – are shown off, a use of film as a platform to flaunt a style that continues into subsequent outrageous designs for Pedro Almodóvar’s Kika (1993), Bad Education (2004), and The Skin I Live In (2011). Most frequently it is Milla Jovovich in her white bondage jumpsuit in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997) that tops articles about Gaultier’s film designs, but his designs for Almodóvar are the most satisfyingly striking. The affinity between director and designer is encapsulated in the flesh-coloured bodysuit for Elena Anaya in The Skin I Live In, a throwback to and disturbing extension of the version from Gaultier’s 1991 collection. Gaultier’s costumes are intentionally intrusive; they divert the spectator’s look away from the characters they adorn, inflect the narrative and impose rather than merely reflect meaning. Gaultier himself makes a cameo appearance in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-porter (1994) sending himself up as he orders rosé made from mixing white and red wines. Seen through Altman’s critical lens, the fashion world is vapid and artificial.

shocks of the new – new black cinema, tarantino, and bollywood: 1989–2000 In 1989 Spike Lee (having come to prominence with She’s Gotta Have It (1986)) released his third feature, Do the Right Thing. The following year in Fort Green, Brooklyn, he set up ‘The Spike Lee Joint’, which each month through 1990–1, sold $50,000-worth of Do the Right Thing memorabilia (Dodgers caps; t-shirts). Do the Right Thing promoted African American street style and was not perceived to be pandering to white audiences as Blaxploitation had been, and the 1990s saw one of the greatest resurgences in Black street fashion since Zooties and Zazous in the 1940s, two styles celebrated in the early scenes of Lee’s later film Malcolm X (1992). The costume designer on Do the Right Thing was Ruth E. Carter,30 who had also costumed School Daze (1988) and then later worked 30

Also known as Ruthe Carter and Ruth Carter.

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on Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X, and others. The journal Lee kept through Do the Right Thing is fascinating, conjuring up a vital sense of wanting to evoke the realities of the Brooklyn of his childhood through colour.31 ‘The look of the film should be bright’, he wrote: ‘I mean Puerto Rican bright. AFROCENTRIC bright. Everybody will be wearing shorts and cutoff jeans. Men will be shirtless, women in tube tops.’32 The smooth slippage from colour to costume is evocative of the centrality of costume to Lee’s vision of Blackness. Ruth Carter went on to become the first African American to win the Best Costume Design Academy Award for Black Panther (2018), for which she incorporated African symbols and graphics in the designs of Queen Ramonda’s 3-D printed Isicholo crown and collar.33 The relation between identity, reality, and street fashion in the New Black Cinema of the early 1990s also characterizes Boyz N The Hood (John Singleton, 1991), which (set in South Central Los Angeles) reproduced the vibrant, bold colours of 1990s street styles. As in Lee’s films, demarcations between on- and off-screen became somewhat blurred; for example, having cast rapper Ice Cube as Dough Boy, Singleton ‘told him to bring all his NWA paraphernalia to the set’.34 Likewise, the Crenshaw t-shirt Cuba Gooding Jr wears as Tre, ‘only appears because costume designer Darryl Johnson was selling these shirts at local fairs’, while Tre’s ‘iconic yellow rayon shirt’ came from the actor’s personal wardrobe.35 Tre is the good, aspirational ‘boy’ to Dough Boy’s bad, but ‘at a time when street style was anything but muted’, he never abandons the bold colours and patterns made popular by LA designers such as Cross Colours and Coogie, as well as Tommy Hilfiger’s preppy denim look. 31

32 33

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Spike Lee (with Lisa Jones), Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 28. Ibid., 29. Cf. Taylor Bryan, Kristen Iversen, and Sesali Bowen, ‘A Celebration of the Most Iconic Fashion Moments in Black Film’, Nylon, www.nylon.com/bla ck-films-best-fashion (accessed 11 October 2020). Brenden Gallagher, ‘The Style Legacy of Boyz n the Hood’, Grailed.com, 2017, www.grailed.com/drycleanonly/boyz-n-the-hood-style-history (accessed 11 October 2020). Ibid.

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Style appropriation works both ways; the converse of Singleton’s absorption and veneration of street fashion can be found to be at work in Quentin Tarantino’s debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992). Talking about Pulp Fiction (1994), Tarantino observed: ‘I’ve always said that the mark of any good action movie is that . . . you want to dress like the character.’36 Well, the look costume designer Betsy Heimann created for Tarantino’s band of hapless heisters proved to be hugely influential. Commonly but erroneously presumed to be suits,37 the five black ensembles have been repeatedly copied, pastiched, and parodied since. London store windows mimicked them, other films (including Doug Liman’s Swingers (1996) and Takeshi Kitano’s Hana-bi (1997)) reflexively cited them, and early audiences were filled with men and women dressed like ‘reservoir dogs’. According to Tarantino, ‘You can’t put a guy in a black suit without him looking a little cooler than he is’,38 though it was only Harvey Keitel who was dressed by a named designer, Agnès b. The French designer’s black-and-white chic later dressed Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta, and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, and she worked on Jackie Brown (Tarantino, 1997) and with David Lynch on Mulholland Drive (2001). Whatever Tarantino believes, screen gangsters are not as cool or impregnable as they imagine, a truism rather neatly summarized by the louder, more overtly narcissistic gangsters in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995) with their predilection for bling, bright suits, widecollared shirts and ostentatious Gabicci-style knits. Taking part in a symposium in New York (2015) John Dunn, co-designer with Rita Ryack on Casino, recalled how under cinema lights genuine 1970s man-made fabrics looked unbelievably cheap, leading to the creation of the ghastly colour-blocked suits in more expensive, but less authentic, wool-blends. Scorsese’s gangsters, however moneyed, are upstarts, even if their molls (as Sharon Stone does in Casino) wear Courrèges leather and drip Bulgari diamonds.

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38

Manohla Dargis, ‘Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction’, Sight and Sound, 4/11 (1994), 17. The outfits were not actually all suits as most viewers thought. Steve Buscemi and Tim Roth both wear black jackets over black jeans. Quentin Tarantino, ‘Interview’, Empire, 44 (February 1993), 53.

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Appropriation is one determining facet of the interrelationship between film and fashion (from female spectators making up Letty Lynton copies to dressing up as Reservoir Dogs); another has always been the link to consumption, indirect in the form of Cerruti gifting actors, direct in the form of consumption (especially of branded goods) on-screen. A hugely important example of the branding of cinema and stars could be found in 1990s Bollywood. The economic liberalization of the mid-1990s brought global brands to India and fashion came of age. Reciprocally, the Indian fashion industry capitalized on the economic potential of Bollywood. Films that defined Bollywood’s 1990s included Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (Sooraj Barjatya, 1994) in which Madhuri Dixit wears a purple wedding saree that had a huge impact on wedding fashion, despite the fact that hitherto purple had not been a traditional wedding colour. The ornately embellished, Anna Singh-designed saree, with its backless blouse and gold jewellery cost Rs 1.5 million ($20,000), but ‘Every second Indian wedding’, one journalist remarked, ‘saw the look being replicated’ and other merchandise (such as the production of purple saree-clad Barbie dolls) followed.39 Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma, 1995) was Manish Malhotra’s breakthrough film. Now a celebrated fashion and costume designer, Malhotra credited Rangeela, in an Instagram post marking its twenty-fifth anniversary, with introducing ‘styling with costume design’.40 Rangeela stands out for the sheer number and eclecticism of its costume changes, from Urmila Matondkar’s bold print skater dress, to her androgynous trousers and waistcoat, her Clueless-reminiscent plaid dress, cropped shorts, little black dress, and berets. In 1998, that year’s highest grossing film, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Karan Johar), popularized tomboy fashions, including dungarees, trackies, and hairbands as well as global street fashion brands such as GAP and Tommy Hilfiger which were starting to arrive in India. 39

40

Namita Nivas, ‘Colour Me Purple!’, The Indian Express (2012), http://archive .indianexpress.com/news/colour-me-purple-/1025169/ (accessed 11 October 2020). www.republicworld.com/entertainment-news/bollywood-news/rangeelaclocks-25-years-manish-malhotra-celebrates-the-milestone.html (accessed 24 October 2020).

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Since the 1990s, explicit branding has been a staple part of how fiction films have appropriated fashion. Although cinema’s seminal, definitive shopping scene has to be Julia Roberts’ shopping spree in Pretty Woman (1990) when, armed with Richard Gere’s credit card and in step with Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’, she sweeps along Rodeo Drive acquiring a full wardrobe of expensive clothes. In Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995) five years later, consumption becomes linked definitively to brands and branding. Alicia Silverstone recalls how, as Cher Horowitz, she had fifty-eight costume changes and countless fittings between takes (Figure 26.7).41 In the opening scene, she arrives at school in a yellow plaid Dolce & Gabbana short-skirted suit; the yellow, Silverstone remarks, was a ‘nod’ to schoolgirl chic but was also ‘absurd’ and in binary opposition to the tsunami of grunge that laps around her.42 Later, Cher is mugged wearing the film’s most notorious dress: a borrowed red

Figure 26.7 Stacey Dash and Alicia Silverstone in Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995). Photo by CBS via Getty Images.

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Cf. www.eonline.com/uk/news/1171877/the-stories-behind-clueless-iconic-co stumes-from-a-red-alaia-to-legendary-yellow-plaid (accessed 24 October 2020). Cf. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GqdlZyWtrg (accessed 24 October 2020).

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Azzedine Alaïa mini. Her assailant points a gun at her and orders her to lie on the pavement; ‘this is an Alaïa!’ she remonstrates.

consumption and top-end brands: 2000–2009 The ephemeralness of fashion is often highlighted by its detractors and has become an explicit feature of narrative films. One manifestation of this internalized critique is the emphasis on labels and branding, as in the Indian examples above or a film such as Clueless. Brands are given a comparably ironic visibility in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), in which Chas Tenenbaum (Ben Stiller) walks about in a pillar-box red Adidas track suit while his sister Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) casually sports a brown Hermès Birkin bag to match her fur coat and G. H. Bass Penny Loafers. The spot-the-label game in films about the fashion industry is less nuanced, as one characteristic common to several fiction films about the industry is that fashion is negatively perceived. In both Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001) and The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006), ‘fashion’ is represented as shallow and ridiculous, its leading figures – designers, editors – mercilessly caricatured as slavish, capricious, or unkind. The idea(l) is to escape that world and rediscover the suppressed naturalness Andy (Anne Hathaway) finds at the end of The Devil Wears Prada. Fashion’s endlessness becomes the pervasive metaphor for the industry’s superficiality, as in the montage of Miranda (Meryl Streep) slamming a succession of coats down on her assistant Andy’s desk at the start of the working day. Ambivalent attitudes to the industry abound as the wastefulness and excess of fashion are repeatedly emphasized. In a later film, Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016), Kristen Stewart hates her job, though is revealed to have ‘a very good eye’, something that comes out as we see her ‘selecting dresses in the Chanel atelier, choosing jewellery at Cartier, buying vintage Hermès accessories and finding a Vionnet dress in London’.43

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Pamela Church Gibson, ‘Interview: Fashion, Film and Costuming’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, 6/1 (2017), 5–6.

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More interesting is the narrativization of this inherent transience, as occurs in In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000) about which its director confessed, ‘I don’t like fashion. It’s transitory’,44 despite the film having become one of the most enduringly significant fashion films since the millennium. For instance, In the Mood for Love inspired Derek Lam’s spring 2004 ready-to-wear collection,45 and, when discussing his autumn 2005 Ming-vase dress, Vogue remarked on Roberto Cavalli’s ‘visible train of thought’ back to Maggie Cheung’s cheongsams (or qipaos) (Figure 26.8).46 Wong Kar-Wai’s remark about not liking fashion is also intensely ironic for William Chang Suk-ping designed for Cheung no fewer than twenty-two cheongsams in vintage fabrics discovered in a warehouse in Hong Kong and dating to the early 1960s, which is when the film is set.47 In the Mood for Love harks back to an era, then, in which the cheongsam was banned by the Communist regime.48 Linking that to an interpretation of the cheongsam as the ‘iconic dress of Chinese femininity’49 as well as to Wong’s comment that ‘the dress is not just a dress. It’s Maggie’s character’s mood’,50 the vibrant precision of the dresses also comes to symbolize women’s identity in an era of suppression, an act implicitly signalled by the blending into the patterned backgrounds as clothes and décor ‘seem to seep seamlessly into one another across the frame’.51

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Classiq, ‘Style in Film: Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love’ (2020), http://classiq.me/style-in-film-maggie-cheung-in-in-the-mood-for-love (accessed 20 October 2020). Cf. www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2004-ready-to-wear/derek-lam (accessed 24 October 2020). Cf. www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2015-ready-to-wear/roberto-cavalli (accessed 24 October 2020). One fashion article that celebrates In the Mood for Love on its twentieth anniversary is www.vogue.com/article/in-the-mood-for-love-20thanniversary-fashion (accessed 24 October 2020). Cf. Daniela Berghahn, ‘“The Past Is a Foreign Country”: Exoticism and Nostalgia in Contemporary Transnational Cinema’, Transnational Screens, 10/1 (2019), 34–52, for a more detailed discussion of the cheongsam as an object of nostalgia. Ibid., 43. Classiq, ‘Style in Film: Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love’ (2013). Pamela Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2012), 100.

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Figure 26.8 Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000). Photo by 2000 USA Films / Online USA via Getty Images.

A contemporaneous release by Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano, Dolls (2002), is similarly elaborately costumed, this time by Yohji Yamamoto, Kitano’s collaborator since Brothers (2000). Takeshi is a stylish and influential director most readily associated with black-suited, taciturn gangsters and sudden acts of extreme violence; Dolls is equally stylized but atypical. Dolls contains almost no dialogue, leaving Yamamoto’s costumes to shoulder the burden of symbolism and storytelling. Dolls ‘recasts’52 the costume designs of bunraku (traditional Japanese theatre) in an enigmatic tale of the never-ending search for love and the inevitability of loss. Yamamoto’s costumes, and the actors’ mechanical gestures, recall the bunraku puppets, but they also – in their colourfulness and tactile texturedness – impose themselves on the fragile narrative. Having given Yamamoto ‘creative freedom’ to ‘mak[e] his own fashion show in the film’, when presented with the costumes, Takeshi panicked, before accepting ‘the costumes as

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Tristen Harwood, ‘A Story in Three Parts: A Study of Takeshi Kitano’s Cinematic Style’, Grailed.com, 2017, www.grailed.com/drycleanonly/take shi-kitano-cinematic-style (accessed 21 October 2020).

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they were’.53 The film’s palate echoes and falls into line with Yamamoto’s costumes: black and white against grey; neutral against neutral. Then there is the sporadic prominence of red, most noticeably when the bound beggars (one of three couples) enter a wood, at which point Sawako’s (Miho Kanno) red looseknit top and frayed skirt chime with the autumnal reds and golds of the autumnal leaves around her. The metamorphosis of fashion into film narrative occurs with Tom Ford’s debut as film director, A Single Man (2009), a free adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel that was much influenced by In the Mood for Love and could visibly be seen to ‘drown a bit in its own gorgeousness’.54 Not unlike the narratively fragmented, equally design-preoccupied To Catch a Thief, Ford’s debut feature is an episodic series of exquisitely designed ‘vignettes’55 in which Ford’s menswear designs and luxury brands are prominently displayed. Ford stepped down from Gucci in 2004 and Colin Firth (as George) is a walking incarnation of the Tom Ford brand he went on to establish. Yet, though the film possesses a too-perfect homogeneity, not all costumes are by Ford.56 As costume designer Arianne Phillips identifies, the black-and-white Watteau-back dress Julianne Moore wears for the scene when George has come over to say goodbye, is vintage – salvaged from a ‘rack at a costume house’.57 Tom Ford clothes continue to feature prominently in films; for Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015) Daniel Craig’s James Bond wears a noticeably snug Ford suit that accentuates Daniel Craig’s muscular physique.

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Cf. https://theinsatiables.tumblr.com/post/53160971002 (accessed 21 October 2020). Prudence Black, ‘Designed to Death: Tom Ford’s A Single Man’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, 2/1 (2013), 105. Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture, 99. In his second movie, Nocturnal Animals (2016), Ford adopted a different approach entirely and, however sumptuously clad Amy Adams was, banned his own clothes from being used. Cf. Phillips in ‘Single Man Costume Designer Had a “Natural” Directing’, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-dec-16-la-en-costumes16-2009de c16-story.html (accessed 24 October 2020).

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guadagnino, crazy rich asians, and the refashioning of tarantino: 2009–2019 Though not a designer, the contemporary director whose movies embody, like A Single Man, the narrativization of style is the Italian Luca Guadagnino. Having made the short documentary Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory (2002) with her, the British actress became Guadagnino’s muse and clothes horse in I Am Love (2009) and later A Bigger Splash (2015) and Suspiria (2018). Swinton has made fashionable connections throughout her career (as model for Viktor and Rolf, for example, in 2003) and ‘fashion is in the DNA Swinton brings to the role of Emma Recchi’.58 Emma’s wardrobe in I Am Love was created (under the direction of costume designer Antonella Cannarozzi) by Raf Simons and his team at Jil Sander and was taken predominantly from the 2008 autumn–winter collection.59 In addition, Swinton wears Damiani jewellery and carries a Hermès Birkin bag, while Hermès and vintage Fendi also adorn Marisa Berenson. In A Bigger Splash Swinton is swathed head to toe in Dior, from the Dior Futurist sunglasses designed especially for the film to the floral kimono, the white silk jumpsuit, or the black body and floating white skirt that recall – or rather signal how far Dior design has travelled since – the launch of the New Look. Guadagnino’s treatment of fashion is complex; he displaces, for instance, in both these films but especially in In the Mood for Love the more nebulous concept of ‘style’ onto the sensuality of food, colour, and cinematography.60 Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017) quickly acquired cult status and its presence in the fashion and film canon is secured by the plethora of style features that ensued, focused especially on Timothée Chalamet’s character, Elio. One noted how ‘fashion trends are always cyclical, and many of Elio and Oliver’s looks are just as on-trend in 2020 as they were in 58

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Karen de Perthuis, ‘I Am Style: Tilda Swinton’s Emma in Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, 1/3 (2012), 270. Cf. www.vogue.it/en/people-are-talking-about/vogue-arts/2011/02/oscarcostume-design-io-am-love (accessed 30 October 2020). Cf. de Perthuis, ‘I am Style’, who uses as a catalyst for her article Swinton’s response to her interviewer’s question, ‘What does fashion mean in I Am Love?’: ‘Substantially less than style does.’

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1983’;61 another offered ‘five easy fashion rules from Elio and Oliver’ namely: double denim; earthy tones; stripes; short shorts; a band t-shirt.62 But Oliver is no Tom Ripley, and as such these questionable claims speak less to Oliver’s style and more to a yearning to inhabit the milieu the stylish film creates. The film has an aura that makes us misrecognize its evocation of 1983 as intensely stylish in 2020, much like, in 2012, when Oliver Peoples brought out their ‘Gregory Peck’ tortoiseshell frames in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, a movie and a star that were not intrinsically stylish, but became so through nostalgic repetition. The stylishness of Guadagnino’s films is effortless if compared, for instance, to the hotly anticipated but ultimately hugely disappointing 2013 remake of The Great Gatsby by Australian director Baz Luhrmann. Miuccia Prada, who had previously collaborated with Luhrmann on Romeo + Juliet (1996), helped to ‘shape the new Gatsby aesthetic’, according to costume designer Catherine Martin. Martin’s coded remark points to yet another example of the tug of war between costume and fashion;63 while fashion magazines in 2013 focused on Prada’s designs for Daisy’s dresses, Martin was keen to stress that ‘Daisy’s costumes were made inhouse in Australia and designed by me.’64 Prada was responsible for the fur-trimmed gold party dress, arguably the film’s iconic piece, and for forty other reworkings of Prada and Miu Miu designs for 61

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Cf. ‘Nine Ways to Get Elio’s Wardrobe from Call Me By Your Name’, https:// spy.com/feature/elio-outfits-call-me-by-your-name-style-125832/ (accessed 28 October 2020). Cf. ‘Why Call Me By Your Name is Still the Film to Watch for Summer Style Tips’, www.gq-magazine.co.uk/fashion/article/call-me-by-your-name-style (accessed 28 October 2020). A year earlier, there was another reported controversy circling around Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2011) between costume designer Amy Westcott and creators of fashion label Rodarte (Kate and Laura Mulleavy) following a decision to only give the designers a back-end credit for their work. Cf. Helen Warner, ‘Ruffled Feathers: Costume, Gender and Authorship in the Black Swan Controversy’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, 1/2 (2012), 169–86. Nakisha Williams, ‘The Great Gatsby: Costume Designer Catherine Martin on Collaborating with Miuccia Prada’, ew.com (2013), https://ew .com/article/2013/01/24/the-great-gatsby-costume-designer-catherine-ma rtin-on-collaborating-with-miuccia-prada/ (accessed 28 October 2020).

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secondary characters, while Brooks Brothers provided 1920s patterns for the multitude of men’s suits and Tiffany & Co. designed Daisy’s diamond flapper-era headpieces. Guadagnino’s cool homogeneity is likewise absent from Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu, 2018), a far less precious and far more satisfying fashion film than Great Gatsby for which costume designer Mary E. Vogt bundled together an eclectic mix of Western fashion, from Stella McCartney animal prints to an elegantly distinctive pleated Missoni dress, Ralph Lauren (who shipped over thirty dresses for filming) to Armani and Rachel’s powder blue Marchesa dress.65 She also worked with and celebrated local designers such as Michael Cinco, LORD’s Tailor, and Carnet, who supplied much of the luxurious jewellery. Chu presented Vogt with fairy tales as points of reference but also In the Mood for Love.66 Several important aspects of the story of film and fashion come together in Crazy Rich Asians: the ironic treatment of brands; fashion experimentation; fashioning character and narrative; and reflexivity – that it feels (with Chu’s reference to Wong Kar-Wai) part of film and fashion’s family tree, comprising multiple connections, unanticipated as well as predictable. Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019), costumed by Arianne Phillips, returns us to what constitutes the notion of ‘cool’. As with Tarantino’s earlier films, while the costuming might be strikingly cool, it is not altogether aspirational. As one article offering ‘10 Style Lessons from Tarantino Movies’ cautioned: ‘Unless you’re going to a fancy dress party, you should never dress like a Tarantino character.’67 Phillips’ costumes – some vintage finds, others reproductions – are stunning (a stand-out item being the maxi faux python coat Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate wears, based on the Ossie Clark python coat Tate wore to the 1968 premiere of Rosemary’s Baby). But, beyond the confines of the 65

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Cf. ‘Couture Stuck in Customs and Wizard of Oz References: Inside the Costumes of Crazy Rich Asians’, www.vogue.co.uk/article/crazy-rich-asianscostume-designer-wendy-e-vogt-interview (accessed 28 October 2020). Cf. ‘How Crazy Rich Asian’s Costume Designer Picked 8 Key Looks’, www .vulture.com/2018/08/crazy-rich-asians-costume-design-key-looks.html (accessed 28 October 2020). Cf. www.shortlist.com/news/10-style-lessons-from-tarantino-movies (accessed 24 October 2020).

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cinema, we still may not aspire to be or even look like the characters who wear them, however ‘super-cool’ Brad Pitt’s aviator shades.68 Just as Tom Cruise’s popular model 3025 Ray-Bans in Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986) or Nicole Kidman’s HANRO Cotton Seamless spaghetti camisole in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) were not necessarily purchased in order to become or even get closer to the stars who made them desirable.

conclusion: 2020, covid-19, and the year of almost no cinema The circuitous and complex story of fashion’s intersection with fiction film is rarely causal; nor is it smoothly linear or developmental. In fact, there is, at this moment in time, a bizarre if satisfying circularity about it. Unveiled out of competition at the 2020 Venice Film Festival was Luca Guadagnino’s Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, a feature-length documentary about Ferragamo that features interviews with Manolo Blahnik, Christian Louboutin, and Martin Scorsese. Speaking at Venice in 2020, but about a film made before lockdown, Guadagnino invokes the ‘osmotic’, mutually inspirational, and explicatory relationship between film and fashion, calling it a ‘marriage’ between a form that tells a story and another that conveys identity.69 It might have been tempting to go along with Guadagnino’s surety, but that would be to suppress cinematic moments that have disrupted ideas of both story and identity, such as the snatched glimpse of some Burberry plaid lining in a teacher’s coat in Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (2012).70 It would also be to disavow the emerging, potential effects of 2020. This chapter was largely written in 2020, a year in which, due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, excursions to the cinema were few and far between. Equally catastrophic has been the effect on the retail industries as, during successive lockdowns, sales figures plummeted and 68

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Cf. www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/10/8501965/once-upon-a-time-inhollywood-costumes (accessed 24 October 2020). See www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRItszKQcRA (accessed 30 October 2020). Cf. for an image of that moment: https://clothesonfilm.com/illuminate-morethan-hide-costume-design-in-a-separation/ (accessed 20 October 2020).

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long-standing high-street shops such as, in the United Kingdom, Top Shop, ceased trading. There were few winners and certainly fashion and film were not among them. Style inspiration came, if at all through 2020, from television, from sharply evoked period dramas such as Steve McQueen’s Small Axe quartet, The Queen’s Gambit, and Mrs America to the visceral urban appeal of I May Destroy You, centring on Michaela Cole’s portrayal of writer and social influencer Arabella. The year of the global pandemic will change everything; it is intriguing to contemplate how fashion and film will emerge redefined.

select bibliography Barthes, Roland, ‘Erté, or À la lettre’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Essays on Music, Art and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 103–28. Berghahn, Daniela, ‘“The Past Is a Foreign Country”: Exoticism and Nostalgia in Contemporary Transnational Cinema’, Transnational Screens, 10/1 (2019), 34–52. Black, Prudence, ‘Designed to Death: Tom Ford’s A Single Man’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, 2/1 (2013), 105–14. Bruzzi, Stella, ‘F For Fashion’, Sight and Sound, 6/11 (1996), 24–8. Bruzzi, Stella, ‘Italian Fashion Designers in Hollywood’, in Sonnet Stanfill (ed.), The Glamour of Italian Fashion since 1945 (London: V&A Publishing, 2014). Bruzzi, Stella, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (London: Routledge, 1997). Butchart, Amber, The Fashion of Film: How Cinema Has Inspired Fashion (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2016). Carter, Ernestine, Magic Names of Fashion (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980). Church Gibson, Pamela, Fashion and Celebrity Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2012). Church Gibson, Pamela, ‘Interview: Fashion, Film and Costuming’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, 6/1 (2017), 5–18. Dargis, Manohla, ‘Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction’, Sight and Sound, 4/11 (1994), 25. De Perthuis, Karen, ‘I Am Style: Tilda Swinton’s Emma in Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, 1/3 (2012), 269–88.

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stella bruzzi Entwistle, Joanne, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Gaines, Jane and Charlotte Herzog (eds.), Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Haggard, Claire, ‘Dressing up in Public’, Screen International MIFED Issue/20 (September 1990). Head, Edith (with Paddy Calistro), Edith Head’s Hollywood (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983). Lee, Spike (with Lisa Jones), Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989). Munich, Adrienne (ed.), Fashion in Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). Paulicelli, Eugenia, ‘Reframing History: Federico Fellini’s Rome, Fashion and Costume’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, 8/1 (2019), 71–88. Steedman, Carolyn, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Tarantino, Quentin, ‘Interview’, Empire, 44 (February 1993). Wilson, Elizabeth, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003 [1985]).

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FASHION AND NON-FASHION CULTURES sophie woodward

introduction The term ‘fashion cultures’ invites consideration of how dress is both a form of differentiation and also a way of seeking commonalities. Fashion may be an explicit medium through which people form connections to others or reject them in the articulation of shared ‘anti-fashion’-style groupings. This chapter will consider how fashioning is a material process through which individuals construct shared (and individual) styles in relation to each other, in specific cultural contexts. There are many academic approaches to fashion which coexist with everyday understandings of what fashion is from the perspective of clothes wearers; in this chapter I unpack some of the complexities and ambiguities within shared clothing cultures that emerge from everyday wearers’ understandings of fashion and the impact upon fashion practices. Focusing upon fashion cultures appears to be rather different than approaching fashion as culture, which tends to centre on how fashion is embedded in particular cultures and representations. In this chapter I will explore how thinking of fashion as culture is, nonetheless, a useful lens to explore fashion cultures through practices of differentiation, rejection, and expressions of shared values among different communities. Accounts of fashion cultures owe a great deal to research into subcultures, where clothing and adornments are considered central to how particular subcultures define themselves.1 1

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979).

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Such fashions are often in opposition to the mainstream and, as I will explore, highlight the ambivalent relations style groupings have to fashion. Fashion emerges as a mode of cultural resistance through DIY practices and is often articulated as a direct opposition to and refusal of mainstream styles; fashion is thus critiqued (as being mainstream) yet also reinforced as something to be resisted. This chapter draws from anthropological approaches which centre the agency of wearers and see dress as a form of practice.2 More recent accounts of subcultures highlight the complexities of the relations of subcultures to fashion. For example, Monica Sklar discusses how items of Punk style have become part of mainstream fashion.3 Thus, a specific fashion culture may be understood as ‘anti-fashion’ when it articulates itself in opposition to the mainstream, even if over time facets of it, such as bodypiercing or safety-pins on clothing, become incorporated into mainstream fashion’s lexicon. There is a vast literature on subcultures, much of which emerges from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, through key thinkers such as Stuart Hall whose work with Tony Jefferson has been instrumental in articulating youth cultural forms and rituals of resistance through cultural practices such as clothing styles and music.4 Established critiques point towards the ways in which style practices are more fluid and negotiable, and explorations of the contemporary relations between music and fashion emphasize forms of sociality rather than defined subcultures.5 Fashions are shared and part of connections between people but are perhaps less bounded or easy to read by others, as there are constellations of style around particular places.6 As such, while the literature on 2

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Karen Tranberg Hansen, ‘The World of Dress: Anthropological Perspectives on Clothing, Fashion, and Culture’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), 369–92. Monica Sklar, Punk Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1975). David Muggleton, Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Andy Bennett, ‘Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste’, Sociology, 33/3 (1999), 599–617. Louise Crewe and Jonathan Beaverstock, ‘Fashioning the City: Cultures of Consumption in Contemporary Urban Spaces’, Geoforum,29 (1999), 287–308;

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subcultures is useful in starting to unpack what anti-fashion and fashion cultures are, I also draw here upon theories of fashion as practice, and of fashion as culture. Tom Fisher and I developed a framework for thinking about fashion as a material practice to think through the interrelated domains of: fashion (a system of production of images and clothing), fashionable (an attribute of people or things), and fashioning/ to fashion (the process and practices of fashioning).7 I draw in particular on the latter process of ‘fashioning’ which acknowledges the importance of the fashion system, but centres the process of creating looks and outfits where fashion does not necessarily precede clothing practices, but emerges from them. This dovetails with perspectives on fashion cultures, to which scholars such as Karen Tranberg Hansen have been pivotal, arguing that fashion is not imposed upon people.8 She takes the example of second-hand clothing markets in Zambia to show that Zambians are not being forced to choose from old, unfashionable garments from the West and therefore are ‘unfashionable’. Instead, fashion is created through the practices of choosing clothing from the second-hand market, showing how items are combined and worn, which resonates with and generates localized notions of fashionability and style. Fashion is a culturally specific and, in Joanne Entwistle’s terms, a situated bodily practice.9 It is something individuals do in relation to the clothing practices of others, in particular historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. This chapter focuses on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fashion practices largely in the United Kingdom and the United States; I take a sociological and anthropological approach and draw from ethnographic and global examples of fashion. In doing so, I aim to develop understandings of how British/American fashion is culturally

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Sophie Woodward, ‘The Myth of Street Style’, Fashion Theory, 13/1 (2009), 83–101. Sophie Woodward and Tom Fisher, ‘Fashioning through Materials: Material Culture, Materiality and Processes of Materialization’, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, 5/1 (2014), 3–22. Karen Tranberg Hansen, Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

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contextual and specific, as well as centring ethnographic examples globally. This chapter first considers fashion as culture to develop an understanding of fashion as being engaged with everyday practices and as material culture, and will be discussed in relation to subcultures and everyday clothing practices as forms of appropriation and resistance. Second, it explores the methodological practices and possibilities for understanding fashion practices through examples of ethnographic analysis, as well as other material methods. Third, the chapter explores fashion cultures through the example of denim jeans as a medium of both fashion and anti-fashion, as well as of ‘normcore’ – a seemingly paradoxical non-fashion trend, as I develop concepts of authenticity. Taken together, these approaches pave the way for thinking about the complex manners in which fashion and resistance are interwoven in different trends and garments. I argue that by taking the lens of everyday fashion practices, and non-fashion cultures, we can look into what fashion is, and how we can understand its multiplicities.

fashion as culture The first way to think about fashion as culture comes from anthropological explorations of clothing practices. There have been many influential accounts which highlight cross-cultural diversity in practices of clothing and adornment.10 These question the equation of fashion with Western clothing, while acknowledging the impact of colonialism and post-colonialism on how both fashion practices and fashion studies have developed.11 Presumed divisions between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ clothing have been challenged in terms of not only the problematic dividing of the world into Western and non-Western, but also of the associated assumption that clothing in some contexts is changing, and subject to the shifts in the fashion system, whereas ‘non-Western’ dress is presumed to be unchanging. While dress practices are changing in settings which have previously been excluded from definitions of 10 11

Tranberg Hansen, Salaula. Regina Root, Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

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fashion,12 this constructed division also had the added limitation that clothing in a context such as the United Kingdom or United States was not subject to the same understanding that anthropological accounts of clothing afford: as situated in localized cultural norms and ideas. Culture is framed as something which emerges from, and is reinforced through, what people do. As Karen Tranberg Hansen notes in her research in Zambia, to refer to the culture ‘of’ a particular place implies that it is static, rather than negotiated or reinforced through practices.13 This is not to deny the importance of institutions and power structures in regulating and generating cultural ideals and meanings. But, instead, by looking at practices it is possible to re-shift the focus in how we think about the relations between fashion and culture. Externally generated meanings, such as when social media influencers or a fashion magazine or show define something as fashionable, may be negotiated and resisted through daily practices. Karen Tranberg Hansen’s ethnographic work in Zambia explores how people choose clothing, and how they put together their outfits.14 While the clothes in second-hand markets originate from elsewhere, and therefore have meanings inscribed within them in these contexts, this does not determine, nor even give any significance to, how and what people select from the markets in Zambia. Fashion is not linear but instead, as this example highlights, is renegotiated by people in particular cultural contexts. Moreover, in a globalized fashion context, as items of clothing move between different countries, the cultural influences and meanings may be multiple. Thinking about fashion as culture in this way means paying attention to how 12

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Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Sandra A. Neissen, Anne Marie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones (eds.), Re-orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Karen Tranberg Hansen, ‘Secondhand Clothing and Africa: Global Fashion Influences, Local Dress Agency and Policy Issues’, in Sandy Black, Amy de la Haye, Joanne Entwistle, Agnes Rocamora, Regina Root, and Helen Thomas (eds.), The Handbook of Fashion Studies (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 408–25. Tranberg Hansen, Salaula.

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clothing selections are made, how and where things are worn, as well as the routes things have travelled and how things acquire and lose meanings. Consideration of the relations between fashion and culture necessitates an acknowledgement that fashion cultures are also economic, social, and political. Fast fashion is centred upon capitalist imperatives of profit which entails global shifts in production for cheaper labour and production processes, shorter lifespans of clothing as items are not made to last but to fall apart, as well as media and advertisements which aim to construct desires for new clothing. This particular context for clothing is the locus within which contemporary consumption practices in a country such as the United Kingdom are situated, even if consumers are reacting against this by re-wearing and mending clothing.15 Considering how people make their own clothing, or fix through ‘re-knitting’, as Amy Twigger-Holroyd discusses, is one form of resistance to dominant fashion cultures of fast fashion and disposability. This opens up ways in which non-fashion cultures may emerge, other than through very evident oppositional subcultural styles. This leads to the second approach I will take, to think through the relationship between fashion and culture: how fashion and clothing are material culture. Fashion is always indexed in material things – whether screens, magazines, or clothing and clothed bodies.16 If culture is a process, so too fashion is not fixed in material things but is a process of materialization.17 Taking the example of the screen – phone or other mobile device – through which fashion is encountered and engaged with, this is indexed in the materiality of the screen. We can also interrogate the processes through which fashion is materialized. As Figure 27.1 shows, the phone is the medium through which fashions and clothing are turned into image – in this example a young woman showing hijab fashions – as well as the medium through which these images

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Amy Twigger-Holroyd, Folk Fashion: Understanding Home-Made Clothes (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Agnes Rocamora, ‘Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in Digital Self-Portraits’, Fashion Theory, 15/4 (2011), 407–24. Woodward and Fisher, ‘Fashioning through Materials’.

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Figure 27.1 Young woman creates images of hijab fashion: mobile phones and processes of materializing fashion. Photo by Jasmin Merdan. Getty Images 1189927617.

can in turn be shared through fashion blogs or fashion Instagram sites and consumed as fashionable images. This can be applied to material practices of making and mending, or how people make clothing choices.18 When choosing what to wear, people engage with fashion, their identities and relations to others. Influences such as fashion and beauty norms are considered by people at the same time as personal and individual considerations such as their intimate relationships. Focusing on everyday material practices opens up a space for thinking explicitly about fashion cultures and the ambivalences of anti-fashion stances which draw upon fashionable clothing, as people are able, through everyday clothing choices, to resist, reappropriate, or embrace particular fashions. Fashion practices are both individual clothing considerations as well as part of the presentation of self in public and a way to connect to others. This may

18

Twigger-Holroyd, Folk Fashion; Sophie Woodward, Why Women Wear What They Wear (Oxford: Berg, 2007).

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be through particular items of clothing or brands. Limited edition branding is one way in which fashion companies and marketing try to create brand desirability, but it is also a route by which people both find an individual identity, and share a style grouping. For example, within the area of luxury streetwear, brands which run limited edition lines include Anti-Social Social Club or Supreme. These can be the basis for connections through fashion; participation rests on requisite fashion knowledges of how and where to acquire limited edition items, as well as recognizing others wearing them. As Kawamura notes in research into sneakers and street style, connections and social bonds are created through online communities as well as through more casual encounters in stores or on the streets.19 As fashions are by definition shared, they are a medium through which people navigate their relations to others. This is an everyday engagement for ordinary people, and not just for those who see themselves as belonging to any particular subculture. Taking the example of everyday anti-fashion stances, within my first wardrobe ethnography one participant who lived in London articulated – verbally and through her clothing – her rejection of mainstream fashion.20 She only shopped in independent shops and wore the same colours and styles of clothing and had done for most of her adult life. She did not know what was in fashion at any particular time, but still had a working understanding, and her own definition, of what fashion is – as manifest in changing styles and high-street shops. These practices of rejection of high-street fashion by individuals can offer insight into how we can theorize fashion cultures and shared frameworks for dressing and understanding fashion expressions. Centring how individuals engage in clothing and fashion practices is a potential approach to subcultures which in some examples explicitly define themselves as anti-fashion (even if as academics we could define them as a fashion culture – having their own styles that change over time). In early, and later evolutions of, writings on subcultures, clothing is understood as a central part of how subcultural groups distinguish themselves, including how 19

20

Yuniya Kawamura, Sneakers: Fashion, Gender and Subculture (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Woodward, Why Women Wear.

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these are constructed in opposition to mainstream styles.21 These groups place particular emphasis upon the opposition to what is perceived to be mainstream fashion, and through examples. For example Monica Sklar has outlined how Punk clothing and other forms of adornment, during Punk’s early emergence in Britain in the mid-1970s, were not available in mainstream shops at the time.22 These were then sourced through fanzines or other alternative forums. Clothing and music practices emerge in tandem, and the shared cultures materialize through these DIY practices of clothing, as well as being evident signifiers to others of membership of this particular subculture. When this discussion is shifted to a more contemporary context, scholars like David Muggleton argue that traditional ideas around subcultures are no longer relevant.23 However, an understanding of dress practices and how these enable the emergence of shared styles is still instructive. This can be applied as much to fashion cultures, as groups which articulate their position as ‘anti-fashion’. Such an approach allows a critique of enduring popular assumptions that the wearing of fashion means that people are dupes. This may have been heavily critiqued within the fashion studies literature, but survives in lay critiques of fashion and is manifest even in the defensive position people take in terms of mainstream fads. Indeed, in research I have carried out into street style, there is a widespread discourse where people state that they dress in an ‘individual’ way or that they wore a particular style first. The discourse is one which points towards the complex ways in which fashion cultures emerge, as very few people explicitly ‘copy’ a style, but instead become attuned to what those around them are wearing. While this is in part a defensive response to the dominant and negative discourses of fashion, it also points to the ways in which fashions may become popular and widely worn, and therefore how fashion cultures emerge. Louise Crewe and Jonathan Beaverstock discussed how ‘style constellations’ emerge around particular locations – such as bars through their research into the Lace Market in the late 1990s (an area with many independent bars 21 22

Hall and Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through Rituals; Hebdige, Subculture. Sklar, Punk Style. 23 Muggleton, Inside Subculture.

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and shops) in Nottingham, United Kingdom.24 People do not directly or consciously copy what someone else wears; by virtue of going to a bar regularly, however, seeing people there, and identifying with the crowd, people ‘end up’ wearing similar clothing. There may still be style leaders in a particular place that people aspire to look like, which may lead to new fashions within a particular locale. However, it does point towards the ways in which a shared way of dressing can emerge in subtle ways. It is linked to a place, to people, and may even be part of an atmosphere – such as the music or ‘feel’ of a place where fashion is a visual, sensory, and material part of a shared experience. This is the way through which people may feel they belong.

methodologies In the previous section I set up an approach to thinking about fashion as material practices where the theories and approach to fashion emerge from, and are in dialogue with, empirical research. One approach that has been instrumental in understanding situated clothing practices is ethnographic, through careful observation of what people do with clothing, as well as participating in people’s lives and getting to know the contexts in which people choose and wear clothing.25 Ethnographic research involves situating clothing practices in people’s lives more broadly, as well as within specific cultural contexts and social relations. This has been effective in decentring discussions of fashion practices and challenging long-held assumptions that fashionability originates only in a Western fashion system.26 I previously carried out ethnographic research into fashion practices by developing an approach, which has been widely taken up and developed, of wardrobe studies.27 The wardrobe ethnography approach built upon anthropological methodologies applied to clothing such as Emma 24 25 26 27

Crewe and Beaverstock, ‘Fashioning the City’. Tarlo, Clothing Matters. Tranberg Hansen, ‘Secondhand Clothing and Africa’. Ingun Klepp and Marie Bjerk, ‘A Methodological Approach to the Materiality of Clothing: Wardrobe Studies’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 17/4 (2014), 373–86.

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Tarlo’s research in India, as well as Joanne Entwistle’s persuasive theoretical arguments for considering fashion as a situated bodily practice.28 The advantage of ethnography is that everyday practices can be observed – whether this is in public spaces or in the home – as well as being a long-term method allowing insight into fashion changes as well as long-term trends. For subcultures, or other fashion groupings, participant observation allows an insider perspective of how a group understands itself – even taking into account the impact of the observer. Brett Luvaas’ research into street-style bloggers demonstrates the possibilities of the ‘participant’ aspect of this approach.29 His research into street-style photography involved him becoming a street-style photographer himself, as he came to understand both the subjects who are photographed as part of street style, and the photographers, from his own insider perspective. Interviews – as part of an ethnographic approach or as a stand-alone method – can be useful in offering an understanding of the meanings clothing has and how people understand shared clothing styles. For example, Monica Sklar interviewed people who wear Punk style.30 Getting people’s own accounts of their practices and motivations afforded insight into the diverse motivations for wearing Punk style, as well as occasional disjunctions between style and lifestyle. Existing ethnographic work highlights that the meanings and the fashionability of clothing do not just derive from production, design, or other fashion media, but emerge from how people engage with the clothing, as externally generated meanings intersect with personal experiences and local cultural contexts. There is, nonetheless, potential for thinking through methods which trace particular fashions, to explore how they move in and out of being seen as stylish. Items from mainstream fashion may be adopted or rejected and, in turn, may become part of mainstream fashion, detached from the items’ origins – as the example of Punk I discussed illustrates. Material methods, such as follow the thing, could be adapted to explore how (non-)fashion cultures are 28 29

30

Entwistle, The Fashioned Body; Tarlo, Clothing Matters. Brent Luvaas, Street Style: An Ethnography of Street Style Blogging (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Sklar, Punk Style.

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developed by tracing how particular items are taken up in the formation of style groupings, as well as how they then either disappear or become part of the mainstream.31 This type of approach has been used to explore clothing commodity chains and, also, to focus upon specific domains of clothing. For example, Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe’s research into second-hand clothing demonstrates how the context of the second-hand shop is a site for shifts and renegotiations of value.32 As Figure 27.2 shows, items of clothing are displayed for their potential appeal, and many second-hand or thrift stores (as they are termed in the United States) have rails of clothing for people to rummage through as they make valuations over desirable clothing. This approach of ‘following’ the clothing could be developed further in relation to

Figure 27.2 Selecting items from a second-hand clothing store: valuing and revaluing clothing. Photo by Britt Erlanson. Getty Images 10186936.

31 32

Sophie Woodward, Material Methods (London: Routledge, 2019). Louise Crewe and Nicky Gregson, Second Hand Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2003).

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specific trends or items of clothing to think through the complex interrelations of fashions and how they are worn.

anti-fashion fashion I will now consider some specific examples to think through the complex, and often ambivalent relations between shared style groupings and how fashion is understood by these groups. Antifashion is a position which is ostensibly a rejection of conventional styles. Given that all clothes are produced within a fashion system and may be understood within a lens of fashionability or unfashionability, it is not possible to exist outside of fashion. Antifashion is a stance and position taken in relation to fashion which involves engagement with, and knowledge of, what is fashionable (or a definition of what fashion is) in order to reject it. Some repudiations of the mainstream may be implicitly anti-fashion (such as subcultures already discussed) where fashion is part of a broader oppositional position to mainstream culture. However, in many cases there is an explicit refusal of fashion – whether this is in relation to the fashion system and its unsustainability, or branding, or the apparently limitless choices fashion presents. The relations between anti-fashion and fashion are complex, connected, and contradictory. Normcore is an example of one such seemingly paradoxical anti-fashion fashion and is thus worthy of consideration as it demonstrates a contradictory and nuanced relation to fashion. Normcore is a term, a style of dressing, and a stance towards the fashion system that gained traction in 2014 in the United States. In particular, it includes the wearing of what are considered to be ‘normal’ items of clothing: jeans, plain t-shirts, unbranded plain trainers, and plain turtlenecks, for example. The woman in Figure 27.3 exemplifies the look by wearing clothing that has no visible branding, wearing a pair of pale blue jeans and a plain t-shirt. All of these items of clothing signify ‘normal’ clothing. All of these types of clothing are well-established items and are taken to signify ‘normal’; these long-standing connotations are ones which allow them to be taken up in this anti-fashion fashion. The non-branding indicates an anti-brand sentiment. Brands are

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Figure 27.3 Normcore: young woman wearing plain clothing that is not visibly branded. Photo by Tony Anderson. Getty Images 1300177594.

a medium to acquire consumer loyalty, increase sales, and can allow many consumers to feel a connection to both a type of clothing and, also, to the others who wear it. Brand loyalty may also connote a lack of consumer agency. This lack of agency is problematized when we consider concrete examples of how people consume and relate to specific brands, as evident in Kawamura’s discussion of sneakers, including specific brands, as this is often a way for people to feel connected to each other.33 Conversely, brands can, for many, come to signify the mass production and lack of individuality of mainstream fashion. Sarah Banet-Weiser 33

Kawamura, Sneakers.

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argues that branding is no longer just a business model. Rather, brands mediate social and cultural relations, as brands become contexts for identities and the stories people tell about themselves.34 In 2014, normcore gained widespread discussion in fashion media, defined as ‘stylized blandness’ and ‘dad-brand non-style’.35 A number of paradoxes emerge here: between stylized and nonstyle and between fashion/trend and anti-fashion. The sense of ‘stylized’ refers to the fact that these are people who have deliberately curated their looks, and selected items that are not explicitly branded, but are neutral in colours and styles. The sense of ‘nonstyle’ refers to the lack of distinctiveness, although unbranded or plain outfits still indicate an evidently curated style. Being an antifashion trend may seem to be a contradiction, in that it highlights how rejection of fashion comes from within fashion’s very parameters. Normcore was not just discussed in fashion media, but fashion journalists also gave tips on how to wear the trend making its treatment and discussion akin to a straightforward fashion trend.36 There are still marked elements that characterize it as anti-fashion: normcore is clothing that does not make the wearer stand out, this is due to wearing clothing that is plain and unbranded, and, therefore, embraces the commonality and shared facets of clothing where the individual recedes in importance.

individuality and authenticity Fashion is often defined as being innovative, where new styles allow the individual to be distinctive. Georg Simmel, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, positioned the oscillation between individuality and conformity as central to how and why fashions change: he argued that innovative dressers and fashion leaders develop a new way of dressing which, when people copy it,

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Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Fiona Duncan, ‘Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion’, The Cut, 26 February 2014. Aimee Farrell, ‘Meet Norma Normcore’, Vogue, 21 March 2014.

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allows it to be defined as fashionable.37 Normcore would appear to be a repudiation of the expression of individuality in fashion, where the aim, even of the first adopters, is to eschew a desire to stand out through their clothing. It is, however, different to people who were already wearing these ‘normal’ items of clothing, as those who wear it as ‘normcore’ do so with knowledge of the fashion system. It is also fashionable in that it is a trend, and also labelled as such within mainstream fashion media, and therefore given sanction and officially defined as fashionable. Normcore raises interesting questions about the relationship between authenticity and individuality in fashion more broadly. Authenticity is a concept that has contemporary purchase where even fashion brands make claims of authentic products and experiences when items are marketed as ‘originals’ (such as Levi’s jeans). In her ethnographic research among members of the 1960s scene in Germany, Jenß argues that authenticity is refracted through the prism of the current and is performed and negotiated as new items are customized or altered to give them a 1960s ‘feel’.38 Authenticity is attributed to items of clothing, as being part of a ‘scene’ that rejects contemporary mainstream fashion. As subcultural style always involves borrowing and reinterpreting there is no original ‘authentic’, and instead it is the ideology of authenticity and how it appeals to people that matters. Angela McRobbie argues that authenticity resonates with youth cultures as it gives people ‘social subjectivity’ – an individual identity that is shared.39 Anneke Smelik has argued that authenticity is ‘essentially fake’, as fashion is always mediated, and the self is performed through these mediations.40 However, this sets up a dualism between a genuine self that exists outside of fashion – mirroring Marxist theorizations that capitalist goods alienate people from who they 37

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Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’, American Journal of Sociology, 62 (1957 [1907]), 541–58. Heike Jenß, ‘Dressed in History: Retro Styles and the Construction of Authenticity in Youth Culture’, Fashion Theory, 8/4 (2004), 387–403. Angela McRobbie, ‘Shut up and Dance: Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity’, in Angela McRobbie (ed.), Postmodernism and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 155–76. Anneke Smelik, ‘The Performance of Authenticity’, Journal for Fashion Writing and Criticism, 1/1 (2011), 76–82.

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‘really’ are, an authentic self – and the fashion industry and massproduced goods. Dress and fashion are ways in which the self is performed, and this process of finding and expressing the self through fashion does not make it inauthentic. Rather, as Jenß suggests, ‘authenticity does not exist per se, but it has to be worked out’.41 We do not need to assess the authenticity of brands of clothing styles, but instead try to understand how and why authenticity matters; in relation to self-identity, it speaks to how clothing fits people’s sense of self. This is often mischaracterized as clothing that is ‘individual’ in a sense of looking different to other people. But I suggest instead that the notion of aesthetic fit (between clothing styles as a sense of self) or feeling comfortable (aesthetically, personally, and in social settings) more effectively explains this relationship. The sense of comfort marks a shift away from the idea that clothing expresses individuality and uniqueness. In my research I have found that the clothing people wear at home is usually jeans or plain tracksuits.42 In a domain where people are free from the judgement of others and could thus express themselves any way they want, people wear the most conformist clothing. ‘Normal’ clothing allows people to be comfortable and ‘themselves’; in public spaces normal clothing allows people to avoid being judged, making who you are difficult to read from your clothing. When normal becomes fashionable in the case of normcore, one could argue that the sense of comfort is even more marked for those who desire to be fashionable. Wearing ‘normcore’ allows people to feel comfortable in being on trend, but not distinguishable by their clothing, or running the risk of getting it wrong. It is of course worth noting that you can still get this wrong, as there are still subtle judgements about which plain t-shirt or trainers are the ‘best’. Wearing plain unbranded jeans, t-shirts, and trainers when it is a trend simultaneously allows people to be fashionable and to express an anti-fashion stance, as in wearing these clothes they are also commenting on the fashion industry and the excesses of choice and rapid turnover of styles.

41

Jenß, ‘Dressed in History’.

42

Woodward, Why Women Wear.

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denim jeans Fashion and anti-fashion have a complex coexistence, as is evident in the example of denim jeans – a garment worn throughout the world, and in many places the most commonly worn garment. It therefore serves as a particularly useful example with which to interrogate fashion cultures, as jeans have – in multiple ways – moved in and out of fashion. Denim jeans are something that have been written about extensively through the Global Denim Project created by Daniel Miller and I.43 While I will draw upon some of the London ethnography that we carried out,44 the discussion here will take a different tack as I will consider explicitly the relationship between denim jeans and fashion. Denim jeans have a central place within existing discussions of subcultures; in the United Kingdom they have been worn over time by teddy boys, rockers, and hippies – to name but a few. The forms, styles, and meanings of the jeans in each case are very different, demonstrating the mutability of jeans. In existing histories much has been made of the ways in which youth cultures from the midtwentieth century drew upon the rebellious connotations that jeans had, via their prior existence as workwear and associations with cowboys. Indeed, a trajectory can be traced which is particularly a history of Americana and the continued associations of masculine rebelliousness through Hollywood icons, and later youth cultures.45 These connotations emerged in part from powerful visual imagery of subcultural groupings; the movements between fashion and anti-fashion can also be understood through the material possibilities of denim jeans. The fabric and style were created to be hardy workwear and so have durability. In addition, as they wear down, the undyed white thread in the twill weave fabric emerges, just as the jeans take on the shape and body of the wearer – a facet exploited particularly within hippy subcultures as they were durable and personal. These same material possibilities are

43

44 45

Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Ibid. James Sullivan, Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon (West Hollywood, CA: Gotham Books, 2007).

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also ones which have led to the popularity of jeans as an everyday item of clothing. In the ethnography of London I carried out with Daniel Miller, we examined people’s practices of wearing jeans on three proximate streets. There are examples of people who have worn the same style and brand of jeans over long periods of time. These were usually men in their forties or fifties who wore individual pairs of jeans until they were completely worn down – and saw them as their most comfortable everyday item of clothing. They had worn the same brand and style of jeans for most of their adult life. In their youth, they wore American branded jeans – such as Levi’s – due to their association with acceptable rebelliousness. When worn over a period of years, or decades, the same style of jeans become a standard dress style for many people and one in which they feel not only comfortable, but also relaxed, knowing they do not have to worry or think about what to wear. The very act of wearing an item of clothing over a long period of time and replacing it with the same brand after it has worn out is an act of anti-fashion – albeit possibly unintentionally so. This is therefore a very different form of anti-fashion to that which I have discussed previously, in terms of an explicit stance and position on fashion. Wearers want to be comfortable with their clothes and do not want to deal with the potential anxieties or choices that engaging with new styles entails. This is not an explicit rejection of fashion from the perspective of attitudes or beliefs, but a desire not to be subjected to the negative potentials that emerge from changing styles. The aesthetic of worn-down jeans also carries its own appeal, and in different ways has been taken up by the fashion industry (seen in the manufactured forms of wear as jeans are ‘distressed’). As Figure 27.4 shows, ripped jeans are a fashionable aesthetic for both individuals as well as particular groups. While jeans rip and wear down in places like the knees, the bottom, or inside the thighs, designating wear, Figure 27.4 shows rips in different and multiple places indicating deliberate ripping for aesthetic and fashionable appeal. As discussed already, fashion is multiple, and specific facets of fashion are being implicitly rejected here: rapid changes in styles and the anxiety and expected knowledges of the fashionable that

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Figure 27.4

Ripped jeans as a fashionable aesthetic. Photo by Catherine Ledner. Getty Images 817844618.

this entails. Importantly, a rejection of fashion is different from being unfashionable, for example, the case of someone who wore jeans throughout their adult life, and only on being laughed at in the street by a passing stranger for wearing an old-fashioned jeans style, did he decide to change the style. This exemplifies a position many people wish to take: the delicate balance between not having to be in fashion but not being unfashionable. There are elements of this position which are anti-fashion: not wanting to be a style leader, rejecting the changes in fashion. As argued elsewhere in this chapter, there are many different temporalities of fashion: fast fashion and slow-burning styles being

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two of them.46 Jeans may be seen as an example of the latter, when they are worn over a period of several years, offering the possibility for people to participate in fashion, perhaps as a basis to assemble other fashionable items (such as tops or shoes or accessories), while not having to always change them or negotiate with what is now on trend. When we consider fashion from the perspective of the wardrobe, this is one of the ways in which most people wish to participate in fashion practice.47 While there are still sections of the population who are innovators and wish to stand out through their clothing, and many who profess to not care at all, most people do not wish to be unfashionable, and prefer to wear what is broadly in style. Yet even among fashion innovators, the anti-fashion followers, and those who just want to fit in, relations to fashion are complex. When fashion is approached from the perspective of the wardrobe and everyday clothing practices, any one person participates in multiple temporalities of fashion. So, for example, a wardrobe may contain jeans in a style worn over a period of years, providing an example of a ‘slow’ burning longer term trend. The same person may have an item that was worn a lot last year that is now defined through the remit of fast fashion as ‘unfashionable’ and another item that is a currently fashionable item. People are able to experiment with different fashions in the security of knowing that their jeans suit them and are part of a longer term slow burning fashion. There are of course fashions in jeans that are not just these slow burning trends, as they are the domain for the differentiation of individuals or groups; these forms of differentiation come from the fashion industry as well as from people’s personal practices. Boyfriend jeans are one such example where the practice of wearing your boyfriend’s jeans became elevated to a trend. ‘Mom jeans’ are an interesting example as they have a very different trajectory to boyfriend jeans. Wearing your mother’s jeans is not an established everyday practice; in fact, the notion of ‘mom jeans’ is more likely an indicator of the unfashionable as worn by women who do not have time or money to buy jeans that are flattering and fit. The 46 47

Woodward, ‘The Myth of Street Style’. Klepp and Bjerk, ‘A Methodological Approach’.

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term ‘mom jeans’ is a derisory one that entered the mainstream in the United States (seen on television programmes like What Not to Wear) as a shorthand for unfashionability. Mom jeans – with tapered legs and high waists – became a shorthand in the 1990s to 2010s for unfashionable jeans that do not fit. Perhaps typical of the cycles of fashion, the unfashionable is taken up as a new style. As Figure 27.5 shows, the jeans style with a high waist, and loose area below the waist is typical of mom jeans. These started to be worn not by women who had no time, but by fashionable young women as this image exemplifies. When mom jeans moved back into fashion they were, of course, not worn by those who are ‘moms’ but by teenagers and young

Figure 27.5

Mom jeans. Published 3 January 2020 by Barbora Polednová.

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women. It was, for example, very fashionable in the United Kingdom among students in 2015 – in the student area of Fallowfield in Manchester it was the main jeans trend. This fashion at the time became indicative of a particular style community. Thus, what was a national trend and available in all the high-street stores was appropriated by a particular group who lived in close proximity, were of a similar age, and went to the same venue. This is an example of an emergent fashion culture, one that dissipates as the students move out of residential halls.

conclusion This chapter has sought to navigate the complex relations between fashion and culture by taking the approach of ‘fashion as culture’ to think about the practices and formations of fashion and antifashion cultures. Fashion is approached as situated within specific contexts which, when viewed as a material practice that people engage in, is one where fashion is already indexed in items of clothing. But meanings and fashionability emerge from specific cultural contexts and through the practices of fashion. Specifically, fashion is understood as a process of materialization, which applies as much to the process of making as to the practice of materially engaging with fashion, through clothing in shops, markets, the wardrobe, or as worn on the body. Clothing is a medium through which people think about being fashionable, fitting in, personal aesthetics, being comfortable, as well as many other considerations. The complex relations between fashion, being unfashionable, and particular cultural ideas are not only ones that academics navigate in articles or chapters such as this, but also relations in which people themselves are engaged. Choosing an item of clothing from a wardrobe would not be framed in terms of the relations between fashion and culture, but instead in terms of whether an outfit is stylish, or appropriate for a location. Academics define and approach fashion in multiple ways, yet so too do consumers. The examples discussed in this chapter highlight the ways in which shared style groupings may emerge organically around a location and group of people who congregate there. Such fashion

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cultures are markedly different to clearly bounded groupings of subcultures who explicitly mark their boundaries in opposition to mainstream style. However, even considering such bounded styles in detail highlights both the ways in which people have multiple motivations as well as how items move in and out of fashion and also particular style communities. Thinking about fashion cultures from the ethnographic perspective allows an insider position, as well as insight into the everyday fashion practices that constitute a shared style grouping. There is also the far less developed position of tracing things as they move in and out of fashion and non-fashion cultures. While magazines and fashion forecasters pay a great deal of attention to trends to try to predict the latest fashions, there is less academic attention to trends and their emergence and decline. What is shown in this chapter is that following items as they move in and out of fashion can be instructive in unpicking the relations between individuals and groups as well as between fashion, anti-fashion, and the unfashionable. The examples given here – of jeans and the trend of normcore – show that the intersecting relations between fashion and anti-fashion require a lot of unpicking. The anti-fashion stance is one which is evidently partial: rejecting the desire to stand out through clothing, and yet still wanting not to be actively unfashionable. This becomes even more complex when the multiple temporalities of fashion are centred: a desire to wear broadly stylish clothing (in terms of not-unfashionable), but not to have the burden of being a style leader or of wearing the latest trends in the right way. People have a contradictory and complex relationship with fashion, and fashion choices are also made for personal and relational reasons which are often more important than concerns of fashionability. These two features of partiality (where only some aspects of fashion are rejected) and complexity highlight the multiplicity of fashion itself. Fashion is a system for the production of clothing as well as the generation of images and knowledges about fashion; it is also an attribute of clothing, as well as being a practice of individuals. Fashion is image and material, it is spectacular and ordinary, conscious and unconscious, about individuality and conformity, and newness and recycling. Fashion scholars approach fashion using different lenses which speak to the diversity of fashion in its forms

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and its reach. Consumers also engage with fashion in its multiplicity when they choose clothes, change styles, watch television, observe people in the street, or read a magazine. The ways in which people understand, reject, or engage with fashion are multiple, and in turn, exploration of these complex relations sheds light on some of the multiplicities of style and social motivation.

select bibliography Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Bennett, Andy, ‘Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste’, Sociology, 33/3 (1999), 599–617. Crewe, Louise and Jonathan Beaverstock, ‘Fashioning the City: Cultures of Consumption in Contemporary Urban Spaces’, Geoforum, 29 (1998), 287–308. Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1975). Hansen, Karen Tranberg, Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Jenß, Heike, ‘Dressed in History: Retro Styles and the Construction of Authenticity in Youth Culture’, Fashion Theory, 8/4 (2004), 387–403. Miller, Daniel and Sophie Woodward, Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Sklar, Monica, Punk Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Smelik, Anneke, ‘The Performance of Authenticity’, Journal for Fashion Writing and Criticism, 1/1 (2011), 76–82. Tarlo, Emma, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London: Hurst and Co., 1996). Woodward, Sophie, ‘The Myth of Street Style’, Fashion Theory, 13/1 (2009), 83–101. Woodward, Sophie, Why Women Wear What They Wear (Oxford: Berg, 2007). Woodward, Sophie and Tom Fisher, ‘Fashioning through Materials: Material Culture, Materiality and Processes of Materialization’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, 5/1 (2014), 3–22. Yuniya, Kawamura, Sneakers: Fashion, Gender and Subculture (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

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The March 2020 issue of Vogue Italia was titled ‘The Real Issue’ and portrayed on the cover Ida, a digitally created model photographed by Mert and Marcus in collaboration with Vogue art director Ferdinando Verderi. As the editor-in-chief Emanuele Farneti explains, the idea was to reflect on the current meshing between virtual and real as condition of existence – the ‘osmosis of these two worlds’1 especially at the time of the coronavirus when citizens’ freedom to move has been drastically limited. The fake model Ida, suggests Farnesi, is evidence of the ways digital life is overcoming physical life in practices of representation and, on the other hand, is an evocation of an absence of corporeality and carnality in this digital world. Published at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, this issue was the first of a series that questions not only fashion’s obsession with representations and discourses about reality and fictionality2 but also provides a platform for a contemporary necessity to rethink practices of production, consumption, and representation in the time of the digital. These new definitions of fashion have not only been pushed by the pandemic, but also especially by the ‘digital turn’, which has produced another space of transformation for fashion practices and ideologies. Runnel et al. explain this digital transition as something implying ‘changes in the use and 1 2

Emanuele Farneti, ‘Se È Vero Ciò che È Vero’, Vogue Italia, March 2020, 30. See, for examples, Peter McNeil, Vicki Karaminas, and Catherine Cole (eds.), Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television (Oxford: Berg, 2009); Susan Kismaric and Eva Respini, Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004).

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application of digital technology [that] bring on changes in practice and in the relationships between cultural institutions and audiences . . . changes in society from the structural (institutional) as well as from the agential (audiences, users, individuals) perspective’.3 Through this lens, the ‘digital’ not only created a new realm for the exaggeration of consumption practices in the industry but it also demanded a rethinking of the material and embodied nature of fashion, while guaranteeing an apparent and augmented agency for the fashion consumer. This shift has been clearly evidenced by the acceleration of digital fashion consumption with the advent of platforms like Farfetch and a raising of awareness and demand for social justice, as we can see from Dolce & Gabbana’s Shanghai scandal of 2019 when the Italian brand was forced to cancel its fashion show in Shanghai due to online users’ complaints accusing them of racism in their Chinese advertising campaign.4 The digital turn in fashion, in this sense, generated a perfect context for what the philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky defines as the ‘hypermodern shift’.5 Rather than a moment of rupture like postmodernism, Lipovetsky characterizes hypermodernity as a phase of transition from modernity where, especially with the advent of the Internet, we are simultaneously exaggerating modernistic consumption practices and hedonistic values, while developing capitalistic antibodies such as social responsibility and activism.6 In this chapter, I will follow this idea exploring the virtual rise of fashion through the Internet and on social media – and its reversal through a growing interest in the materiality of the body and corporeal identity. I question whether these should be seen as departures from a material and sartorial notion of fashion, or whether their meaning and importance can only be understood in relation to longer trajectories of fashion and its definition. To do so 3

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Pille Runnel, Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Piret Viires, and Marin Laak (eds.), The Digital Turn: User’s Practices and Cultural Transformations (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), 7. Jing Zhang, ‘What Went down at Dolce & Gabbana’s Shanghai Scandal’, NowFashion, https://nowfashion.com/what-went-down-at-dolce-gabbana-sshanghai-scandal-26334 (accessed 25 April 2023). Gilles Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). Ibid.

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I will first unpack the multiple definitions of fashion in relation to multiple types of modernity mainly focusing on Eurocentric constructions of this concept. Then I will highlight three main axes that have characterized the relationship between fashion and different types of modernity – time, consumption, and the body/ identity – in order to test the ruptures or continuities in today’s fashion hypermodernism. These three concepts will be used as key entries to explore the ways in which theories about hypermodernity may – or may not – help us to make sense of fashion in the time of the digital, recalibrating its discourses and ideologies and its role in contemporary culture.

fashionable prefixes: from modernity to hypermodernity Any discussion of hypermodernity and fashion inevitably involves dealing with the ways the latter has been defined relative to different concepts of modernities. A large part of the study of fashion, as a material and immaterial phenomenon, has in fact developed from the idea that fashion can be seen as both cause and effect, trigger and evidence, of different phases of modernity7 and postmodernity8 and even other types of modernities like metamodernity, alter-modernity, or even post-postmodernity.9 These works have explored how the definition of multiple modernities – and therefore fashion – has changed in relation to values and historical periods. These shifts have been individualized as trivial in the 7

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See, for example, Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: I. B. Tauris, 1985); Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans (eds.), Fashion and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2005). See, for example, Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Fashion and the Postmodern Body’, in Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (eds.), Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 3–16; Barbara Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System (Oxford: Berg, 2005); Efraat Tseëlson, ‘Jean Baudrillard: Post-Modern Fashion as the End of Meaning’, in Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (eds.), Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 215–30. See, for example, José F. Blanco and Andrew Reilly (eds.), Fashion, Dress and Post-Postmodernism (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021).

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very definition of fashion intended as a fluctuating force characterized in multiple production, consumption, and representation practices of clothing and the self. Each shift, each modernity, has helped to redefine fashion, identifying specific historical turns, production and consumption practices, ideas of time, places, figures, texts, images, and objects as representative of fashion’s centrality in constructing and embodying these different modernities. While scholars have importantly expanded the perspective of modernity beyond Eurocentric views,10 most studies have explored the different constructions of fashion as a modern phenomenon in relation to the industrial capitalistic society in Western areas during the sixteenth century and associating it with a moment of rupture in relation to production and consumption processes in Eurocentric society. This view has focused not only on questions of rationalization and technological innovation of production and consumption processes, but also on the ideological effects on the definition of modern society and individuals. Fashion has been seen as a central terrain platform for the understanding of this process as the term has been adopted to identify the experience of modernity in relation to industrial systems of production, design practices, and consumption habits of clothing. But it also references systems of signification where ideologies of modernity proliferated and affected identity formation through vestimentary practices and media. The city, the department store, the flâneur, the model, and the future have become symbols not only of a modern idea of change and progress, but also of control and the disciplining of bodies. As Elizabeth Wilson suggests, ‘modernity’ also seems a useful way of indicating the restless desire for change that is characteristic of cultural life in industrial capitalism, the desire for the new that fashion expresses so well.11 Discourses about morality and waste, rationality and excess, adornment and function, class struggles and distinction, secular traditions and progress, the ephemeral and the disposable have characterized the association of fashion with modernity – especially during the 10

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Angela Jansen, ‘Fashion and the Phantasmagoria of Modernity: An Introduction to Decolonial Fashion Discourse’, Fashion Theory, 24/6 (2020), 815–36. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 63.

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nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Simultaneously, these discourses have also promoted the understanding of fashion as a central lens through which modern society can be observed or criticized. Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans clearly sum up this perspective arguing that fashion could be seen as a ‘process . . . a useful mechanism for interrogating the subjective experience of modern life’ where fashion can be considered as both ‘a market driven cycle of consumer desire and demand; and . . . a modern mechanism for the fabrication of the self’.12 While this duality has been at the centre of the exploration of multiple practices and discourses on fashion and modernity in the early twentieth century, this perspective has also characterized the exploration of postmodernity in relation to fashion at the end of the twentieth century. Barbara Vinken speaks about ‘post-fashion’ to identify how the fashion industry and its discourses followed, during the 1980s, a postmodernist discourse generating a de-hierarchization and hybridization of systems of production, consumption, and representation of clothing and identities. Vinken associates this shift with historicism, not only the work of new emerging fashion designers but also the emerging of new media, new cities of fashion, new figures – like the stylist – new discourses on freedom and liberation of the body able to open up the institutional discourses and values of modern fashion.13 Elizabeth Wilson, in a chapter entitled ‘Fashion and the Postmodern Body’ further explains this shift as a form of ‘pluralism’, an echo of postmodernist critique of the rational and evolutionary values of modernity. According to Wilson, postmodernity sees fashion as an ally in the fragmentation of modernity, breaking institutional knowledge, grand narratives, and monolithic normative identities.14 ‘Fashion, like postmodernism’, suggests Wilson, ‘remains ambivalent’.15 This ambivalence is dictated by a capacity to break down modernistic categories and to see fashion as liberation rather than suppression while investigating ‘its proliferation, a multiplication that would ideally include its emancipation from stereotypes of gender, race or age’.16 With these premonitory words, 12 13 14 16

Breward and Evans (eds.), Fashion and Modernity, 2. Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist. Wilson, ‘Fashion and the Postmodern Body’, 6, 7. 15 Ibid., 15. Ibid., 14.

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Wilson seems to have predicted, in 1992, the establishment of fashion studies which see the body as a central prism through which fashion and dress become tools to unsettle the normative discourses in society.17 Here fashion might be translated into the extreme forms which Fredric Jameson defined as a ‘hallucinatory euphoria’.18 During the 1990s, the excessive mediation of fashion contributed to a postmodern discourse in which ‘consumption of sheer commodification [was seen] as a process’19 or to use Baudrillard’s terms, where fashion contributed, in a post-industrial era, to transform the commodity into a simulacra, into a sign.20 While these conjunctions of fashion with modernity and postmodernity are clearly artificial historical categorizations, they help to reflect not only how fashion provides a lens through which shifts in the capitalistic neoliberal system can be observed, but also the ways in which the latter affect a new experience of the present. What seems to remain constant in these shifts from modernity to postmodernity is the capacity of fashion to embody these moments and the interpretation of their ideological foundation. In fact, the use of fashion as a process of production and consumption, of commodities and identities, is a recurrent thermometer, adopted to measure the state of our society even in relation to what has been defined as contemporary hypermodern times. Defined primarily in relation to the advent of the Internet (1995) and the digital economy, the theory of hypermodernity is often associated with the work of the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky who suggests that hypermodernity can be seen as a ‘new society of modernity’,21

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See for example, Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson (eds.), Body Dressing: Dress, Body, Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (1984), 59–92. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), x. See, for examples, Caroline Evans, ‘Yesterday’s Emblems and Tomorrow’s Commodities’, in Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis (London: Routledge, 2000), 93–113; Tseëlson, ‘Jean Baudrillard’. Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, 31.

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where its values, practices, and mechanics are exaggerated but not completely passed over. A new society of modernity is coming into being. It is no longer a matter of emerging from the world of tradition to reach the stage of modern rationality, but of modernizing modernity itself and rationalizing rationalization: in other words, destroying ‘archaic survivals’ and bureaucratic routines, putting an end to institutional rigidities and protectionist shackles, privatizing everything and freeing it from dependency on local conditions, while sharpening competition. The heroic will to create a ‘radiant future’ has been replaced by managerial activism: a vast enthusiasm for change, reform and adaptation that is deprived of any confident horizon or grand historical vision.22

With these words, Lipovetsky stresses not only a shift from modernity to hypermodernity, but also a continuity. What hypermodernity represents is an extreme ‘consummation of modernity’ taking the shape of ‘a globalized liberalism, the quasi-general commercialization of lifestyles, the exploitation “to death” of instrumental reason, and rampant individualism’.23 Once again, Lipovetsky suggests the presence of a dual scenario: an extreme form of neoliberal economy where consumerism and individualism reign but where a renascent humanism may also re-emerge. At the same time, Lipovetsky reminds us that ‘not all pre-modern elements have evaporated, but they themselves function in accordance with a modern logic that is deregulated and deinstitutionalized’.24 To move from postmodern into a hypermodern time, according to literary scholar Raffaele Donnarumma, is to identify a passage that takes different shapes. It is not a rupture but rather it takes the shape of ‘a decline and a progressive ending, a slip and transformation, an emphasis’.25 While the transition from modernity to postmodernity has been characterized as a rupture, hypermodernism has been identified as a milder alteration, which, however, contains and accentuates many of the values contained in modernity and postmodernity. As Sedgwick argues, sometimes modern, postmodern, and hypermodern coexist, although hypermodernity may be a way to 22 25

Ibid., 34. 23 Ibid., 31. 24 Ibid., 31. Raffaele Donnarumma, Ipermodernità. Dove va la Narrativa Contemporanea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014), 109. My translation.

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make visible these archaic, modern principles while still showing their influence.26 As in the previous cases, fashion is taken as a central example in this definition. Lipovetsky sees fashion as a form of ‘logic’, a ‘principle’ that has forged in society ‘technologies of ephemerality, novelty, and permanent seduction’.27 While these values have regulated the formation of a modern system, Lipovetsky suggests that its forms and behaviours have today been intensified and exported into other fields. As he argues, hypermodern society is a result of ‘the spread of an accelerated obsolescence in the products and models on offer as well as multiform mechanisms of seduction: novelty, hyper-choice, do-it-yourself, not just wellbeing but better-being’.28 If here Lipovetsky considers fashion as a metaphor or an ideology, a few scholars have also investigated, in more concrete ways, this sort of hyper-ness of fashion without, however, working through the theories of the French philosopher. In more recent times, the emergence of new technologies, the Internet, and the digital sphere have pushed researchers to investigate further the ways fashion may become a conductor of the acceleration of the values and practices of modernity – in relation, once again, to both identity formation and consumption.29 Not only new figures, new spaces of production and consumption but also new perspectives on time have been explored. Agnès Rocamora, for example, has theorized how personal fashion blogs may become ‘mirrors of hyper-modernity’ in showing a duality: on the one side another form of control and labour exploitation, and on the other the possibility, for women, to articulate new spaces and imaginaries of the self.30 This perspective has been seminal to identify new figures like the Instagram influencers but also to show 26

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Peter R. Sedgwick, Hypermodernity and Visuality: Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture, and Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, 36. 28 Ibid., 36–7. Agnès Rocamora, ‘Hypertextuality and Remediation in the Fashion Media: The Case of Fashion Blogs’, Journalism Practice, 6/1 (2012), 92–106. See, for examples, Agnès Rocamora, ‘Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in Digital Self-Portraits’, in Bruzzi and Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures, 112–26; Agnès Rocamora, ‘New Fashion Times: Fashion and Digital Media’, in Sandy Black, Amy de la Haye, Joanne Entwistle, Regina Root, Agnès Rocamora, and Helen Thomas (eds.), The Handbook of Fashion Studies (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 61–77.

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how digital and social media create new spaces of production, representation, and consumption of fashion and the self.31 What connects these studies is their focus on hypermodern times without, however, necessarily engaging with a definition of a passage, a shift from modernity, postmodernity, and hypermodernity: something that has characterized the discourse on hypermodernity especially in philosophical and sociological terms. Except in a few cases, theories on hypermodernity have been hardly applied to the study of fashion and, in the following sections, I will focus on the different aspects that seem to emerge in contemporary fashion and that resonate with Lipovetsky’s theory of hypermodernity. All these theories provide tools for us to rethink the core principles and methodologies that characterize the study of fashion in relation to different modernities. This enables us to insert the case of fashion within this body of literature and make better sense of fashion’s potential to interact with recent phenomena like the Internet and social media on the one side and the growing interest in the materiality of the body and corporeal identity on the other.

present fashion Hypermodernity, like modernity and postmodernity, develops a specific relationship with time and fashion, giving us the opportunity to measure and analyse these relations.32 If modernity focuses on an idea of the future, and postmodernity rethinks the role of the past in the present, hypermodernity is obsessed with the present. While being constantly connected to a potential future, hypermodern times entail an acceleration of time that demands a satisfaction in the present, rather than a modernist idea of future as progress. Lipovetsky suggests that the ‘cult of the new is asserting itself as an everyday and widespread passion’.33 Following this perspective, Sedgwick suggests that the hypermodern present does 31

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See, for examples, Monica Titton, ‘Fashionable Personae: Self-Identity and Enactments of Fashion Narratives in Fashion Blogs’, Fashion Theory, 19/2 (2015), 201–20; Rosie Findlay, Personal Style Blogs: Appearances That Fascinate (London: Intellect, 2017). Caroline Evans and Alessandra Vaccari (eds.), Time in Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, 34.

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not ‘turn toward the future: it is already . . . as a projective visualization of the present in redeemed form’.34 Behind this idea there is the assumption that hypermodern times are structured around free-market capital based on a need to operate in the now, therefore structurally embracing an economic and technological surplus. As Lipovetsky suggests, ‘the present is assuming an increasing importance as an effect of the development of financial markets, the electronic techniques of information, individualistic lifestyles, and free time’.35 It is in this vision that fashion is identified as the extreme logic on which societies and individuals are now structuring themselves. Contemporary fashion is ‘ubiquitous’, establishing the ‘axis of the present as the mode of temporality now socially prevalent’.36 This sort of fashioning of the everyday becomes clearly evident in our digital life and the pervasiveness of social media in the construction of a social time.37 Fashion is now turned into a paradigm of life spreading across different sectors, becoming a model applicable in political, economic, and societal systems.38 On the other hand, the contemporary fashion industry and its multiple practices show, as in the case of modernity, a unique capacity to embody, stage, and affect these hypermodern times more clearly than other industries, thanks to its capacity to respond to the immediate. This capacity has been exaggerated by the advent of the Internet and fashion’s techno-capitalism.39 The clearest example can probably be seen in the ‘See Now, Buy Now’ commercial strategy. Begun in 2016 by brands like Burberry,40 the idea was born to combat the copy of their works by mass-fashion brands and allow customers to order outfits directly online during the presentation of shows. This strategy unsettled the ‘industrial 34 35 37

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Sedgwick, Hypermodernity and Visuality, 32. Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, 35. 36 Ibid., 37. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2014). See, for example, Natalie W. Nixon and Johanna Blakley, ‘Fashion Thinking: Towards an Actionable Methodology’, Fashion Practice, 4/2 (2012), 153–75. Luis Suarez-Villa, Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009). Limei Hoang, ‘How Burberry Is Operationalising “See Now, Buy Now”’, Business of Fashion, 17 September 2016, www.businessoffashion.com/art icles/news-analysis/how-burberry-is-operationalising-see-now-buy-now (accessed 25 April 2023).

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time’ of fashion,41 compromising both established mechanisms of representation and production processes of fashion. While evidencing a more immediate form of consumption, the ‘See Now, Buy Now’ strategy also exemplifies the way consumption processes may alter production processes. These commercial practices interestingly evoke Baudrillard’s consumption theory where he denounced these techniques of control of the individual through shifts from production to consumption. He highlighted how production practices develop a control of consumption practices, stressing how ‘production and consumption are part of one and the same process of expanded reproduction of the productive forces and their control . . . “buy now, pay later”’.42 While Baudrillard’s theory was more critical of the core principle of emerging neoliberal markets and discourses on consumers’ freedom and enjoyment,43 today we experience a further mechanism where immediacy and anxiety become the central value of consumption as clearly shown by the ‘See Now, Buy Now’. We passed from a ‘later’ to a ‘now’ but also from ‘buy’ to ‘see’. Visuality and immediacy have been elected as central discursive tools that characterize the idea of hypermodernity based on what Lipovetsky defines as ‘the reign of urgency’.44 These shifts, however, are rooted not only in a discourse of materialistic property but also in the formation of hypothetical immaterial consumption needs. The digital economy has, to use Baumann’s terminology, ‘liquified’ fashion and created a new Barthesian system of textual and visual fashion where not only meaning but also economic values and immediate, immaterial needs are constructed. Clothing can not only be pre-ordered live, but can also remain virtual as in the case of Dapper Labs’ silver cape dress. Designed by The Fabricant it was bought for some $10,000 by Richard Ma for his wife at an auction in May 2019.45 The garment was never materially produced, but it was digitally shot by Dapper Labs and was meant to be worn only digitally by Ma’s wife. 41 42

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Evans and Vaccari, Time in Fashion, 12. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage, 1998), 82. Ibid. 44 Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, 50. Chavie Lieber, ‘Would You Buy a Virtual Pair of Nikes?’, Business of Fashion, 8 July 2019, www.businessoffashion.com/articles/technology/vir tual-fashion-digital-products (accessed 25 April 2023).

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While this digital change clearly affects creative design practices,46 it has also emerged from an increasing attention on marketing and big data analysis that has completely shifted not only production practices, but also consumption norms.47 In recent years, luxury brands have begun to rely on digital data to transform their practices of production into responses ‘on demand’, similar to the processes governing the mass production, fast fashion industry. Agencies like TAG walks, Linkfluence, and Heuritech have been developing a new strand for trend forecasting replacing cool hunting practices, based on visual and field-research, with data collection and analysis. Digital consumption activities, as much as personal data like hashtags, tags, and online clicks, have become commodities liberated from the costs of dispatch, and are sold to brands. Algorithms and digital reports have become the ultimate tool with which to predict potential consumption behaviours.48 These new enterprises of public data not only show how the new digital economy is provoking the creation of new practices and figures but also, and most importantly, show the extreme condition of the digital economy and the centrality of the ‘now’ in the reorganization of production and consumption spheres in fashion. At the same time, as suggested by a French digital designer at Neuro Studio, the digital shift may also become an opportunity to combat waste and foster sustainability, where brands may declare a way to ‘sell a new way of thinking because we find it sad that the same techniques of production have been used for decades when they are extremely wasteful’.49

fashion and the economy of the live This attention to the digital sphere as the ultimate space of production and consumption has become even more intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic that has literally transferred industry and social life onto the digital screen. The nowness of the consumption 46

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Silvano Mendes, ‘See Now, Buy Now: The Position of the Press in Fashion’s “New” Consumer Model’, International Journal of Fashion Studies, 4/2 (2018), 258–91. Nello Barile and Satomi Sugiyama, ‘Wearing Data: From McLuhan’s “Extended Skin” to the Integration between Wearable Technologies and a New Algorithmic Sensibility’, Fashion Theory, 24/2 (2020), 211–27. Ibid. 49 Lieber, ‘Would You Buy a Virtual Pair of Nikes?’

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has been joined by a discourse on ‘participation’ as another trope to the present-ness of fashion and the acceleration of its practices. Tony Pinville of Heuritech explains: ‘From our data, we offer our customers, twelve hours after the show, a top 5 of the most promising products.’ 50 The digital has favoured an extreme form of rapid response, accelerating analysis and the speed of consumer demand, evidencing how historical materialism and labour are still crucial methodological tools in order to unpack the scope of hypermodern times. The fashion industry seems to constantly and drastically shift its practices, spaces, and discourses of production and consumption. Yet as discourses about ‘the live’ and transparency proliferate, those about the repercussions on labour seem to dwindle. The necessity to consume the ‘new’ digitally has not only created new figures or pushed brands to reinvent forms of consumptions, but also activated a transformation in the value of time,51 paradoxically urging us to move back to a historical materialism not necessarily as an antidote to hypermodernity but rather as a tool to better reveal its mechanics.52 This perspective was at the centre of the exhibition Unmaking the Fashion Digital Image where my colleagues, my students, and I tried to unpack the transformations of time, practices, and value of a catwalk image at the time of the digital.53 To do so, we investigated a covering agency named InDigital.tv: an agency created to shoot all international fashion weeks and create digital content for online platforms like Vogue.com. The aim of the exhibition was to illustrate the entire process of production of the 50

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‘A partir de nos données, nous proposons à nos clients, douze heures après le défilé, un top 5 des produits les plus prometteurs.’ My translation. Valentin Pérez, ‘Les algorithmes s’invitent aux défilés’, Le Monde, 28 February 2020, www.lemonde.fr/m-styles/article/2020/02/28/les-algorithmess-invitent-aux-defiles_6031197_4497319.html (accessed 25 April 2023). See, for examples, Rocamora, ‘New Fashion Times’; Evans and Vaccari, Time in Fashion. Ulrich Lehmann, Fashion and Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). The exhibition Unmaking the Fashion Digital Image was held at Glassbox Art in Paris from 11–15 December 2019. The exhibition was curated by the MA students of the Fashion Studies Programme at The New School Parsons Paris under the direction of Marco Pecorari and Antoine Bucher. See https:// culturesdemode.com/evenements/unmaking-the-fashion-digital-image/ (accessed 25 April 2023).

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catwalk digital image to reveal specific creative hierarchies, unknown working profiles, forms of exploitation, new frontiers of creative labour, economic negotiations and commissions. By retracing the social life of the ‘fashion digital image’ via fieldwork and interviews, it was possible to explore the trajectories of the catwalk image from its depiction at the show to its arrival on fashion portals. How do these images arrive on our screen? Who and how many people are involved in the making of these images? What specific techniques, tasks, and conditions are at play in the presentation of these images in real time? The project unveiled the hidden multiple figures (runners, postproduction workers specializing in backstage images, accessories, etc.), the different temporalities and perceptions of time in the making and the selling of the image. As reported by our interviewees, the time to deliver high-quality catwalk images has drastically changed in the last five years.54 While in the 2010s the agency was asked to deliver high-quality images after twenty-four hours, in recent years the demand has moved to a few hours after the end of the show.55 These new temporal constraints are restructuring the landscape of copyrights and temporal control of the image. As evidenced by a catwalk picture by Vogue Studio (1960), the mediation of the show, the control and exclusivity of the image has always been an element characterizing the dissemination of high fashion. Nevertheless, the digital has introduced a new temporality that dictates a regime of the immediate prescribing of more flexibility of labour. As in the case of InDigital.tv, workers not only had to follow the non-stop schedule of worldwide fashion weeks but also had to be flexible in terms of mobility and living conditions. Not only do we see the disappearance of figures like the catwalk photographers, but also a symmetric intensification of the desire among consumers for fashion and the new in the present. As Lipovetsky stressed, neoliberal computerized society has inherited the rhetoric of the present, and, in doing so, it has transformed the present and ‘brought [it] to its apogee by shuffling different time frames and intensifying our desire to be freed from the constraints 54

Ibid.

55

Ibid.

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of time’.56 If fashion has always been framed by these principles, the current technological shifts have not only accelerated, but also helped to create new territories and languages of desire where the live is becoming a new central trope. The exaggeration to which Lipovetsky refers seems to have conversely exaggerated the hyperness of high fashion and its role in performing capitalistic behaviours and mechanics. This tendency has accelerated during the pandemic, where the impossibility of physically consuming in the store has given birth to a variety of alternative practices such as the ‘live shopping party’ or ‘shoppable livestream’ where influencers working as personal shoppers are reaching revenues of 145 million euros per live event. Playing on the idea of the digital party and using Instagram Live application, the brand IKKS has proposed live sessions of shopping while the platform WeChat sponsored the first ‘Livestream Shopping Festival’ on 6 June 2020. Other brands like Gucci have begun to promote Gucci Live57 – live remote sessions in its boutique – while Prada has not only streamed its shows online but also created events and discussions about contemporary culture, inviting philosophers, curators, and activists to participate. These examples show the paradoxical emergence of the need for knowledge, techniques, and technologies, and, on the other hand, the de-evaluation of labour conditions, in the staging of a paradoxical contemporaneity of production and consumption. This is probably best evidenced by the tendency of staging labour, in luxury brands, via performances online or even live performances as contemporaneous events, to the virtual where customers are invited to see ateliers and the spaces of creation as in the case of Les Journées Particulières organized by LVMH. These practices of staging labour exhibit the body and knowledge of the worker and his/her body. While these practices are presented as moments of participation and sharing knowledge, they strangely echo the staging of new technological machines in the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 as well as other Exhibitions Universelles. But, if the spectacle of labour and technologies 56 57

Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, 39. ‘Gucci lance le service de shopping virtuel Gucci live’, Retail Detail, 5 May 2020, www.retaildetail.be/fr/news/mode/gucci-lance-le-service-deshopping-virtuel-gucci-live (accessed 25 April 2023).

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characterized at that time demonstrated progress and modernity,58 today the staging of the worker and his/her body seems to be a new derivative of the commodity, a new form of exchange. If in nineteenth-century exhibition culture visitors were asked to consume modernity via the staging of innovative technologies, on the Internet users are invited, at a time of economic depression, to not simply consume the idea of commodity but to consume the labour and the worker who make the events possible. This culture of ‘the live’ thus becomes a vector to facilitate an economy that is, especially during the pandemic, suffering from the possibility to activate in physical spaces like stores the inanimate character of the commodity. Lipovetsky speaks about a culture of ‘I want everything now’ to explain how this need for the immediate and the present has ‘turned into an absolute, glorifying subjective authenticity and the spontaneity of desire’.59

fashion games To buy something means we’re playing the game – buying a touch of novelty in our subjective daily lives. Here, perhaps, lies the ultimate meaning of the mechanism of hyperconsumption.60

For the 2021 autumn–winter Paris fashion week during the height of the COVID pandemic, and the impossibility of staging a show, the art director Demna Gvasalia of Balenciaga decided to present his new collection in the format of a 3D video game. Titled Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow, the video game followed the trend of collaboration between fashion houses and the gaming industry.61 It presented a post-apocalyptic world in 2031 where users/customers are faced with the challenge of emancipating themselves from a world of consumption (the city), moving through five zones to arrive at the final zone of freedom (the 58

59 61

Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, 38. 60 Ibid., 84. Natasha Hitti, ‘Balenciaga’s Afterworld Video Game Takes Players to a Secret Rave in the Forest’, Dezeen, 9 December 2020.

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mountain). In Afterworld, the protagonists leave a distressed, desolated (but still consumer-centred) city – a symbol of modernity – to flee to a forest symbolic of a critique of the Anthropocene. When asked about the collection, Gvasalia explains how the idea was to present a future world, future clothing, and most importantly a new form of resistance through clothing at a time of environmental crisis.62 The game collection seems, at sight, to be one of many examples of fashion’s obsession with the future, but its reflection on the future represents both a disillusionment with a potential future and a reaffirmation of the need for a change in the present. In many ways, the game seems to embody the contradictions at the root of hypermodernity. While inviting participants to buy the collection, the game proposes to remove any contact with commercial spaces symbolically starting the game in the Balenciaga shop and finishing in a forest. While the collection recalls the durability and materiality of fashion, with a recuperation of discarded objects, it transforms labour and the objecthood of a collection into a virtual immaterial experience. While evoking the necessity of protecting our identity via a symbolic transformation of medieval iron armour into a knitted overall, it customizes users with avatars of real individuals exposing them to another level of a ‘paradoxical individualism’: it makes us play, as an ultimate practice of consumerism.63 In all these contradictions, the Balenciaga game reflects more than a mere commercial strategy but stages the strategy of hypermodernity as ‘a cultural space in which multiple contexts of strategized ambivalence (or ambivalent strategies) and reflexive flexibility (or flexible reflexivity) fluidly interconnect, merge, or diverge’.64 This binary nature of hypermodernism is also what characterized Charles’ and Lipovetsky’s views, recognizing in this hypermodern time the coexistence of oppositional values: individualism and collectivism, social responsibility 62 63

64

Ibid. Sébastien Charles uses this term to comment on Lipovetsky’s critique of the role of hypermodernity in the creation of the self. Sébastien Charles, ‘A Paradoxical Individualism: An Introduction to the Thought of Gilles Lipovetsky’, in Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, 1. Ronnie Lippens, ‘Hypermodernity, Nomadic Subjectivities, and Radical Democracy: Roads through Ambivalent Clews’, Social Justice, 25/2 (1998), 16–43.

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and irresponsibility, future and memory. All these principles paradoxically regulate the very core of hypermodernity as the ‘binary logic of our societies will continue to increase’.65 The Balenciaga game seems to articulate these tensions, staging an interesting parallel between the fashion industry and the digital games industry in participating in the discourse on hypermodernity. The viewer/consumer/player is invited to virtually experience the ideals as described by Lipovetsky. The game and the collection work as a manifesto of hypermodernity, playing on various contradictions: on one side, the abandonment of the capitalistic city, on the other, nature as form of escapism. This duality is stressed in the press release which explains how ‘the narrative of afterworld is anchored to mythological pasts and projected futures with timeless archetypes and speculative imagery’.66 The collection furthers this binary thinking where symbols of future and progress are decontextualized and placed alongside archetypes of the past. Different logos from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are employed and recontextualized following Gvasalia’s work on logos and consumerism. As declared by the designer, the ‘NASA logos from disparate eras suggest retro astronaut-wear from a time before mass space travel, repurposed into futuristic outerwear’.67 Rather than a simple reuse of futuristic outwear, this appropriation of logos differs from previous collections, and serves to consume both an idea of a future, and a modern progressive way to experience it. The NASA logos are here converted into commodities. Rather than a postmodern action of recontextualization,68 this design action discredits a belief in the future. The 2031 portrayed – which is actually a present-future – becomes a cynical environment where NASA and its technological innovation can be discarded and transformed into a fashionable item, projecting the failure of principles of progress and futurism. To use Lipovetsky’s words, the game shows 65 66 68

Charles, ‘A Paradoxical Individualism’, 26. Balenciaga Autumn–Winter 2021, press release. 67 Ibid. Alla Eizenberg, ‘Sartorial Statement of Post-Postmodern: Vetements-Making Meaning of Multiplicity’, Conference paper, https://research.aalto.fi/en/ publications/sartorial-statement-of-post-postmodern-vetements-makingmeaning-o (accessed 25 April 2023).

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a ‘limited modernity’ while portraying a hypermodern time where the individual is invited to ‘consummate modernity’.69 Describing the model of hypermodernity as a form of radicalization of modernity’s values and modes of being, Lippens recontextualizes this concept as a specific socio-political discourse on hyper individualism and personalization in consumption practices. Donnarumma continues, explaining that the hypermodern condition ‘has abandoned a trust in progress’, working as a neurotic compulsion that ‘neutralizes its idols (quickness, newness . . .) while it analyzes them’.70 This practice of neutralization is revoked in the game and the collection where the practice of upcycling and circular fashion become slogans on a t-shirt. These hypermodern strategies become exaggerated by the decision to use a virtual game as a medium to present the collection. Fashion, like gaming, is a training ground for hypermodern subjects, instructed to hyper consume. Similar to fashion, the gaming industry converts the values of newness and speed into a lucrative economy of the live that not only shows the current effects of the digital economy but also amplifies practices of selfcommodification. The liaisons between the fashion industry and the gaming industry have become central in this process, focusing on identity formation as contested consumable terrain. It is not only fashion brands that started to flirt with the gaming industry but also the gaming industry began to adopt sartorial techniques to augment the experience of its users. In 2018, Riot Games announced that League of Legends, the biggest selling PC game, boasts over 80 million active players every month. According to Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft has reached a new high of subscribers thanks to a new attention to fashion practices in identity formation.71 As digital gaming grew in popularity, thanks to widening Internet access, digital identities brought an entire new economy and consumption practice online. A clear example can be seen in games like Counter-Strike or League of Legends 69 70 71

Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, 32. Donnarumma, Ipermodernità, 104. My translation. Shaun Assael, ‘Skin in the Game’, ESPN, 20 January 2017, www.espn.com/ espn/feature/story/_/id/18510975/how-counter-strike-turned-teenager-com pulsive-gambler (accessed 25 April 2023).

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where players are invited to customize their looks – or ‘skin’ in the terminology of the game – of their avatar.72 Considered as part of virtual goods, virtual skins can be bought, collected, sold, and traded online. These skins follow a similar seasonal principle as they respond to specific festivities (Halloween, Christmas, etc.), game challenges, themes and even special editions with special collaborations with brands like Gucci or Burberry. When speaking about the experience of buying skins for a game, senior reporter at the video-game site Polygon, Nicole Carpenter, explains: ‘I actually downloaded a Gucci dress from a custom creator, and I felt so cool in-game wearing it when all my friends came over to my island. It’s sort of hilarious how an in-game character can make me feel like that.’73 Practices of aspiration and selfprojection become crucial in gaming consumption as much as fashion and the digital accelerate these processes. As Maude Bonenfant argues, hypermodernity radicalizes modernity, and games participate in a discourse where ‘progress, reason, and happiness are overly (hyper) actualized rather than surpassed (post)’.74 In her reading of ludoeconomics, Bonenfant suggests how, in video games, this means staging the sequence of actions (progress) in such a way that players may optimize their decisions (reason) for their own gratification (happiness). Game-players, like fashion consumers, become ‘immaterial workers, train[ed] to better meet the labour market’s needs’, becoming ‘mobile and flexible . . . like hypermodern capitalists, . . . accustomed to this very process of adaptation’.75 This seems to resonate in games where customers are asked to identify with different avatars, shop and constantly renew their styles, while endlessly being projected into a perverse game of consumption where they are asked to achieve virtual individual success while, at the same time, developing debts or

72 73

74

75

Ibid. Emilia Petrarca and Nicole Carpenter, ‘Is Balenciaga’s Video Game Actually Any Good?’, The Cut, 8 December 2020, www.thecut.com/2020/12/balen ciaga-video-game-afterworld-review.html (accessed 25 April 2023). Maude Bonenfant, ‘Hypermodern Video Games as Emblems of Empire or How the Gaming Multitude Adapts to Hypermodernity’, Games and Culture (September 2020), 2. Ibid., 5.

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even gambling habits.76 The contradictions between these consumption games seem to be perfectly staged in the case of Balenciaga’s game where players are invited to reach a state of freedom which is then symbolized by a character wearing a hoodie with the print ‘free’ which, according to the press release, theoretically alludes to ‘an advanced state of mind and the importance of freedom in future societies’.77 Rather than being a hymn to individual freedom, however, Balenciaga’s game performs the ultimate logic of hypermodernity where gaming, as much as fashion, ‘is not a “waste of time” but’, as suggested by Bonenfant, ‘a learning ground for hyper-activity – for profitable activity’ where ‘hypermodern consumers are alienated from the game as well as from themselves’.78

hypermodern bodies In the article ‘The Body – The New Sacred? The Body in Hypermodernity’, Ivan Varga argues that today we have arrived ‘at a stage when new technologies are more intrusive in manipulating the body and its image’ since ‘in hyper-modernity, technologies of the body take over, which results in the ever-greater objectivization and externalization of the body’.79 While, as mentioned above, questions of identity formation have been central to the discussion of fashion in relation to modernity and postmodernity, hypermodernism – and more specifically the digital realm – introduces another aspect. As Varga argues, ‘Simmel’s, Freud’s and Foucault’s ideas led to the development of the modern sociology of the body. Postmodern conditions created a situation where individuality is thought to be maintained by and through the public presentation of the body, and in hypermodernity the “virtual body” was made possible by the spread of digital technology.’80 What 76

77 78 79

80

Joshua Brustein and Eben Novy-Williams, ‘Virtual Weapons Are Turning Teen Gamers into Serious Gamblers’, Bloomberg, 20 April 2016, www .bloomberg.com/features/2016-virtual-guns-counterstrike-gambling/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Balenciaga Autumn–Winter 2021, press release. Bonenfant, ‘Hypermodern Video Games’, 5. Ivan Varga, ‘The Body – The New Sacred? The Body in Hypermodernity’, Current Sociology, 53/2 (2005), 209. Ibid., 211.

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Varga is here referring to is today’s understanding of the body as more than a physical corporeal entity, affected and formed by analogical techniques of the self, but an entity constructed via a technological and digital realm. Profiles on social media platforms, facial filter applications, and sensorial tools are just some of the ways bodies and identities are today resetting the idea of the body, conversely projecting a new discourse on ethics that has associated hypermodernity with a new humanism. Digital and social media have particularly contributed to this tendency, leading a new discourse on the self, identity construction, and gender formation. In this sense, Donna Haraway’s theory of the cyborg and techno-feminism has become a central reference especially her proposition to move beyond naturalism and essentialism and embrace a more ambivalent definition of the human, and advancing the idea of the cyborg as ‘cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’.81 While her theory is dated 1985, and is a call to white radical feminism to open a more equal and inclusive discourse on identity politics, it perfectly resonates with the contemporary identity digital sphere where human beings negotiate the construction of the self online As Haraway stresses: ‘late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, selfdeveloping and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert.’82 Her work has been the foundation for a discussion in the field of design and fashion studies where debates on post-humanism and critiques of Anthropocene theory have been developing scholarly work on a decentralizing human-centred categorization and redistributive agency.83 81

82 83

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 149. Ibid., 151. See, for examples, Annamari Vänska, ‘How to do Humans with Fashion: Towards a Posthuman Critique of Fashion’, International Journal of Fashion Studies, 5/1 (2018), 15–31; Anneke Smelik, ‘New Materialism: A Theoretical Framework for Fashion in the Age of Technological Innovation’, International Journal of Fashion Studies, 5/1 (2018), 33–54.

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In this sense, the most representative example can be seen in the emergence around computer-generated virtual influencers as entities that perpetuate a discourse on authenticity and the real. The clearest example is probably the nineteen-year-old virtual influencer Miquela Sousa aka Lil Miquela, created in 2016 by Trevor McFedries and Sara Decou who are the co-founders of Brud. Lil Miquela was one of the first virtual influencers who, having reached 2.9 million followers on Instagram, collaborated with high fashion brands like Chanel, Prada, and Off-White, as well as events such as Coachella, releasing two music videos and her own clothing line Club 402. Lil Miquela has been on the cover of multiple high fashion magazines and is often depicted dressed in hot off the runway looks. While fashion collaborations with virtual figures are not new, the case of Lil Miquela and other virtual celebrities are triggering some analogies with reflections developed in theories about the hypermodern self. Miquela can be seen as an archetype of the hypermodern subject and what Charles, paraphrasing Lipovetsky, defines as hypernarcissism, that is ‘the name we can give to the epoch of a Narcissus who presents himself as mature, responsible, organized, efficient and flexible’.84 At the core of this ‘new’ subject, according to Lipovetsky, is the idea of constant duality between identity, anxiety, and consumerism on the one side and a more conscious socially engaged subject on the other. Miquela stages this in multiple ways. Her entire existence as a virtual persona is based on introspective work, as she questions her inner-self and even her being. After a period of online posting and discussions, on 19 April 2018, Miquela revealed her nonhuman status with a post questioning her identity: ‘I keep getting asked if I’m real or fake. But, I’m really here, I’m really talking to you. I’m really DMing people. I’m just trying to make some great art and make the world hurt less . . . Can you name one person on Instagram who doesn’t edit their photos?’85 This ‘coming out’ of Mikela and the conscious appeal to her own mistakes and weaknesses perfectly performs the contradictions that characterize the discursive tropes of hypermodernity and 84 85

Charles, ‘A Paradoxical Individualism’, 11. Lil Miquela Instagram account, 19 April 2018.

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techno-economic principles.86 While Miquela’s discourse seems to circle around issues of authenticity, differences between virtual and real, what is actually at stake is a performance of fear and uncertainty. The expression of weakness and personal feelings, argues Lipovetsky, has become another frontier of capitalism in the hypermodern times giving ‘greater social visibility’ and ‘new mass legitimacy’ in terms of agency.87 These have become crucial principles not only in our current digital economy but also, in particular, in the fashion industry. When asked about their appeal for the fashion industry, Miquela’s creators explain how ‘the art of placing the character in a life they believe to be their own allows fans to immerse themselves in a similar suspension of disbelief’.88 This personification grants credibility not only to followers but also to brands. Furthermore, virtual influencers guarantee new scenarios in this moment of economic constraint. As Scott Guthrie explains: ‘the clothes they advertise will always hang beautifully from their pixelated bodies. They are mainly present on Instagram, a place where the copy is preferred over the original.’89 Behind this explanation of the effectiveness of the digital image, what is actually at stake is the economic value and the replacement of labour that exemplifies more clearly the lucrative scope of these new virtual identities. This emerges very clearly from the words of one of Miquela’s creators: ‘I would argue that Lil Miquela is MORE real than many other influencers. The secret to the success of Lil Miquela as an Instagram influencer is her portrayal of the rounded self and her relationship with her followers. Elements are expertly curated to communicate the rounded self of what it means to be human. A set of values and ethics which overlay the commercial imperative of identifying brand sponsorship.’90 86

87 88

89

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Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London and New York: Verso Books, 2020). Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, 41. Christopher Travers, ‘What Is a Virtual Influencer? Virtual Influencers, Defined and Explained’, Virtual Humans, 4 November 2020. Roanne de Kluizenaar, ‘The Uprise of CGI Influencers: Musings of Armando Kirwin, Artur Mizaffari, and Scott Guthrie’, Virtual Humans, 16 October 2020. Sab Guthrie, ‘Performance Art or Cynical Manipulation? How Avatars Are Taking over Influencer Marketing’, Influence, 4 October 2018, https://influenceonline.co.uk/2018/10/04/performance-art-or-cynical-

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Discourses on the real, and the authenticity of the digital self, serve a commercial end. With Miquela, commercial activities are always coupled with social responsibility and ethical discourses: from her coming out, to her support of political and social campaigns like ‘Black Lives Matter’ or ‘#metoo’. While following a new tendency in the fashion industry where brands are aligning or promoting their work through social justice discourses, Miquela’s political engagement with issues of race and feminism are at odds with her being a female character and her race transformation from her first post to her final identity.

conclusion I started this chapter with the case of Vogue’s fake model which resonates with the case of Miquela, which, in many ways, also embodies the archetype of the hypermodern subject or what Lipovetsky defines as hypernarcissism. Using the myth of Narcissus, Lipovetsky explains that we have moved from the paradoxes of the postmodern Narcissus who was ‘intensively hedonistic and libertarian’ to a hypermodern Narcissus who presents himself as mature, responsible, and inclusive but is characterized by fears, anxiety, and self-centred discourses.91 Sara Mills furthers this idea, writing that ‘the hyperindividualism of the hypermodern as characterized by fashion is double edged; “we” are both disciplined and free, and we constrain ourselves but assert our individualism’.92 The responsible but anxious virtual body of Miquela becomes a reminder of a mutation of the modern and postmodern body. We seem to move from a healthy, rational, and ambivalent body, to a responsible but unstable body incarnating the complexities and ideologies of a neoliberal economy. When discussing the blogosphere, Min Pham suggests that ‘such a political economy does not traffic in the neoliberal rhetoric of rational disembodiment but rather animates the material realities of race, gender, generation, sex, and class that frame the (digital and

91 92

manipulation-how-avatars-are-taking-over-influencer-marketing/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Charles, ‘A Paradoxical Individualism’, 11. Sara Mills, ‘Book Review’, The Sociological Review, 53/4 (2005), 779.

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real) production and consumption of fashion objects, images, and knowledge’.93 Similarly in the case of Miquela we see this contradiction, as we witness the core principles of hypermodernity and the continuation of a Eurocentric vision of modernities by the industry, even when attempting to expand its horizons to issues of diversity and equity. Ethics and values are now becoming commercial tools, symbolized and promoted by a computer-generated entity that acts as a reminder of the ways hypercapitalism and the digital economy operate through the contemporary impossibility to recognize ‘ourselves outside the domains of the ethics’ while showing us that ‘just like mass-produced objects and mass culture, ideological discourses have been taken over by the logic of fashion’.94 As a sort of antidote to these practices, it is important to recognize the emergence of counter-discourses that have put emphasis on the embodiment and the value of the material as in the case of collective ‘Craftivism’ that pushes a non-digital experience and, as its proponents suggest in their manifesto, raises ‘consciousness, creating a better world stitch by stitch, and things made by hand, by a person’.95 The idea is to reclaim ‘the slow process of creating by hand . . . because activism is . . . done by individuals, not machines’.96 These words speak volumes to an emerging movement of resistance to the practices described in this chapter; but its very existence seems, once again, to confirm the duality of hypermodern times as ‘a transitional period, made up of diverging, converging, and contradictory reactions to the diverging, converging, and contradictory dynamics of hypercapital’.97

select bibliography Assael, Shaun, ‘Skin in the Game’, ESPN, 20 January 2017. www.espn .com/espn/feature/story/_/id/18510975/how-counter-strike-turnedteenager-compulsive-gambler (accessed 25 April 2023). 93

94 95

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Min Pham, ‘Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings, and the Political Economy of the Digital Raced Body’, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 26/1 (2011), 9. Charles, ‘A Paradoxical Individualism’, 14. The Craftivism Manifesto, https://craftivism.com/manifesto/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Ibid. 97 Lippens, ‘Hypermodernity’, 26.

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marco pecorari Baudrillard, Jean, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage, 1998). Crary, Jonathan, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2014). de Kluizenaar, Roanne, ‘The Uprise of CGI Influencers: Musings of Armando Kirwin, Artur Mizaffari, and Scott Guthire’, Virtual Humans, 16 October 2020. Donnarumma, Raffaele, Ipermodernità. Dove va la Narrativa Contemporanea (Bologna: Mulino Editore, 2014). Evans, Caroline and Alessandra Vaccari, Time in Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991). Jansen, Angela, ‘Fashion and the Phantasmagoria of Modernity: An Introduction to Decolonial Fashion Discourse’, Fashion Theory, 24/6 (2020), 815–36. Lipovetsky, Gilles, Hypermodern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). Lippens, Ronnie, ‘Hypermodernity, Nomadic Subjectivities, and Radical Democracy: Roads through Ambivalent Clews’, Social Justice, 25/2 (1998), 16–43. Rocamora, Agnès, ‘New Fashion Times: Fashion and Digital Media’, in Sandy Black, Amy de la Haye, Joanne Entwistle, Regina Root, Agnès Rocamora, and Helen Thomas (eds.), The Handbook of Fashion Studies (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 61–77. Russell, Legacy, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London and New York: Verso Books, 2020). Sedgwick, Peter R., Hypermodernity and Visuality: Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture, and Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Suarez-Villa, Luis, Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009). Vänska, Annamari, ‘How to Do Humans with Fashion: Towards a Posthuman Critique of Fashion’, International Journal of Fashion Studies, 5/1 (2018), 15–31.

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part v Fashion, Colonialism, and Post-Colonialism

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CHINESE COOLIE HATS Global Dialogues on a Sign of Servitude, c. 1840–1940 miki sugiura

introduction Even the humblest item of clothing can be imbued with critical meanings. This is the case with the Chinese coolie hat, headwear linked to the mass migration of indentured labour, populations whose toil shaped colonial societies and cultures globally. Central to this chapter is understanding how indentured labourers’ clothing – the clothing of servitude – was created and disseminated beyond borders, how it interacted with production and consumption, and what agency and impact it had. This chapter is also an endeavour to see how the very essence of forced and bonded labour – the forcefulness and social segregation – interplayed with clothing. The clothing of servitude is gradually becoming a stimulating genre of global and cross-cultural history of fashion, with leading studies examining slave and indentured servants in the Atlantic world.1 With a few exceptions, such as Peter Lee’s pioneering work on slave women’s clothing in Southeast Asia, few studies have examined the eastern side of the Indian Ocean 1

Steeve O. Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004); Robert S. DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Sophie White, ‘Dressing Enslaved Africans in Colonial Louisiana’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 85–103.

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world.2 This chapter sheds light on less studied East Asian aspects and attempts to place Chinese coolie hats within the dynamic contexts of other headwear that are diagnostic of status, time, and place. The Chinese coolie trade was among the most dramatic mobilizations of indentured labourers on a global scale. The movement intensified after the First and Second Opium Wars between 1840 and 1860 and continued on a mass scale until the outbreak of the Second World War, and involved various locations in China, the Indian Ocean, the Americas, and beyond.3 Although the total number of Chinese coolies is hard to estimate, the number of migrating indentured Chinese labourers to the Americas and the Indian Ocean is calculated to have been between 5 and 10 million.4 The number of Chinese coolies that the Japanese mobilized between 1905 and 1945 and sent to Manchuria is estimated at around 20 million.5 In a long-term view, 2

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Peter Lee, Sarong Kebaya: Peranakan Fashion in an Interconnected World, 1500–1950 (Singapore: Asian Civilisation Museum, 2014). Lee’s work showcases how the distinctiveness of slave women’s clothing lasted over centuries, placing them in the long history of the making of Peranakan fashion. Pioneering works that estimate the number of Chinese coolies include Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolie in Peru, 1849–1874 (London: Greenwood Press, 1970); John A. Moses, ‘The Coolie Labour Question and German Colonial Policy in Samoa, 1900–1914’, The Journal of Pacific History, 8/1 (1973), 101–24; Arnold J. Meagher, ‘The Introduction of Chinese Laborers to Latin America: The “Coolie Trade”, 1847–1874’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of California Davis, 1975); and Jim Warren, ‘The Singapore Rickshaw Pullers: The Social Organization of a Coolie Occupation, 1880–1940’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 16/1 (1985), 1–15. More recently Hu-DeHart declared the numbers of Chinese Fujian workers migrating to Cuba between 1847 and 1874 as 141,000: Evelyn Hu-DeHart, ‘From Slavery to Freedom: Chinese Coolies on the Sugar Plantations of Nineteenth Century Cuba’, Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History, 113/1 (2017), 31–52. For studies on migration of Chinese coolies to the Americas, see also Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008). Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

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the mobilization of labourers termed ‘Chinese coolies’ is closely linked with the ‘North Asian turn’ in the century of global longdistance migration flow (1846–1940).6 Coolie is a word of trans-border etymology, originating from Tamil but used for describing Indian, Chinese, and other Asian manual workers.7 As historian Moon-Ho Jung states, ‘coolies were never people or legal categories. Rather, coolies were a conglomeration of racial imaginings that emerged worldwide in the era of slave emancipation, a product of the imaginers rather than the imagined.’8 Nothing represents these racial imaginings more than their hats, the conical straw hats made of sedge, wood, or wheat fibres, known as ‘coolie hats’ to this day. These workers were sent across periods and places, such as the California gold rush from the 1840s; sugar plantations in Peru, Cuba, or Hawaii from the 1850s; railroad construction sites in North America like Nevada or Panama from the 1870s; mines in Transvaal in the 1900s; and docks and urban streets in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai in the 1910s. In all these locales, illustrations of Chinese coolies commonly showcase their iconic conical hats. Together with the queue (bian-fa) hairstyle, the hats in these illustrations aimed to represent an obstinately unchanging people, perceived as oblivious to processes of modernization, even as they built railways and other industries. Moreover, they were everywhere subordinated to imperial and colonial powers. The vital roles they played in building infrastructure and expanding production demand a close look at their iconic headwear. Asian conical hats have a history of global interactions from the middle ages. They were repeatedly adopted by ladies’ fashion trends in Europe and were worn in different regions of the Indian Ocean.9 The association 6

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Adam McKeown, ‘Global Migration, 1846–1940’, Journal of World History, 15/2 (2004), 155–89. A scholar noted in 1934 that Manchurian and Chinese manual labourers were called coolies by the Japanese and local people. Tetsunosuke Misaki, ‘Manshu¯ ni okeru Manshijin Ro¯do¯sha’ [Manchurian and Chinese Laborers in Manchuria], Rikkyo Economic Review, 13 (1934), 23–40. Jung, Coolies and Cane, 5. Gustave Schlegel, ‘Hennins or Conical Lady’s Hats in Asia, China and Europe’, T’oung Pao, 3/4 (1892), 422–9. Conical hats were adopted across the Indian Ocean, Koikois, and Cape Malaya in the eighteenth century.

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with coolies seems to have halted such global exchanges in the period of high coolie employment.10 Conical straw hats came to identify a particular social group, representing obsoleteness and endless toil. However, there was no explicit dress code imposed on coolies requiring them to wear this type of hat, in contrast to sumptuary laws that dictated the clothing of African enslaved populations. In some cases, they were advised to wear hats by authorities, but the type was not stipulated. It is important to ask how a hat could maintain such a strong hold among a group of indentured labourers between 1840 and 1940, with an influence reaching faraway regions. Was it merely a biased and powerful racial image that was not based on reality but more on the image that was shared and replayed among different colonial regions? These considerations hardly address all the questions, as coolies were shipped to various locations on the opposite sides of the Pacific rim, but it is a place to begin. The period in which Chinese coolies operated coincided with an unprecedented global boom in hat production. Straw hats were at the centre of this boom. From the eighteenth century, straw hats had been popularized in Northwestern Europe and colonial North America. The boom extended even further in the nineteenth century, entering a second phase when a series of refined and innovative straw hats emerged and spread globally.11 Mid-century gold rush migrants heading to California introduced toquilla fibre hats from Ecuador as ‘Panama’ hats. The creation of Brazil hats, Manila hats, Pandan hats, and bamboo hats in the Dutch East Indies followed. With the invention of straw-sewing machines in 1870, a wave of straw boater hats ensued.12 10

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The author Chiang Yee was surprised to discover ladies wearing coolie hats in London in 1930s and noted that ‘ever since the success of Lady Precious Stream, a man’s hat became a woman’s fashion’. Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller in London (London: Country Life, 1938), 186. Marian J. Nichols, ‘Straw Plaiting and the Straw Hat Industry in Britain’, Costume, 30/1 (1996), 112–24. See Melissa Bellanta, vol. 1, 702, for cabbage tree hats in Australia. Jessica Elfenbein, ‘Baltimore’s M.S. Levy and Sons: Straw Hat Makers to the World, 1870–1960’, Essays in Economic & Business History, 26/1 (2008), 89–102.

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East Asian-Chinese, Japanese, and Taiwanese were heavily involved in this surge both as suppliers (of both straw materials and hats) and as consumers. By the 1870s, Qing China was the largest exporter of straw plaits and hats to Britain, France, and the United States. China exported an average of 10 million hats per year for the most part during the 1870–1938 period.13 Soon Japan rivalled China in straw plait exports. Japan also invested heavily in the creation of imitation Panama hats initiated in colonized Taiwan, which had refined hat-making technology (Figure 29.1). East Asians were also frenzied consumers in the global hat boom. The change from traditional hairstyles to Westernized shorter hair with the Haircut Law (1871) in Japan, and the 1911 revolution in China, led to an enormous surge in the consumption of men’s hats of ever-expanding variety. Thus, ‘hats became worn by “90–95%” of Japanese men on the street in Tokyo’ around the 1920s. Moreover, adult male residents in Tokyo owned, on average, six types of hat by the late 1930s, with winter felt hats and summer straw boaters or Panama hats becoming staple accessories.14 Similarly, Western hats together with a wide variety of styles from different parts of China (including Beijing, Suzhou, Hangzhou style, pacification hats, or little melon caps) proliferated in China around the time of the 1911 revolution.15 With high expectations Japan immediately embarked on a campaign to sell its imitation hats to China. How were coolie hats placed within these dynamic developments in the East Asian and global hat production and consumption, and how did they interact with those developments? The next section tracks the passage of coolie hats to the Americas between 1840 and 13

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Saiichi Benno, Kachu¯ no¯son Keizai to kindaika [Rural Villages of Central China and Modernization] (Tokyo: Kyu¯ko shoin, 2004) 238–43. See http://nagoya-boushi.org/rekishi.htm (accessed 20 September 2020); Tokyo¯ Bo¯shi Kyo¯kai, To¯kyo¯ no Bo¯shi Hyaku Niju¯nen Shi [120 Year History of Hats in Tokyo] (Tokyo: Tokyo¯ Bo¯shi Kyo¯kai, 2005), 116–17, cited in Yuko Kikuchi (TrAIN and CCW, University of the Arts London), ‘“To¯yo¯ shumi” of Household Products Designed in Imperial Japan of Manchukuo and Taiwan’, paper presented at UEA Sainsbury Institute workshop: ‘Tôyô shumi in Imperial Japan’, 13–14 June 2013. Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 80–1.

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Figure 29.1 The making of Screwpine imitation Panama hats, Taiwan, 1915. From Taiwan So¯tokuhu Shokusankyoku, Rinto¯bo¯ Seizo¯gyo¯ Cho¯sa (Investigation on Screwpine Production) (Taipei: Government General of Taiwan Civil Affairs Bureau, 1915), 30–1.

1870, presents the reasons why coolie hats were initially unified under one category, and reveals the variety of hats coolies wore. The following section addresses the development of the hat industry in China between 1860 and 1920 and clarifies the hat dress codes that emerged in China in response to the expanding coolie trade, while analysing contemporary Japanese marketing reports. The final section focuses on British Malaya and Southeast Asia between 1880 and 1940, which became major coolie destinations. Throughout, this work analyses how coolie hats affected the production, consumption, and meanings of hats within shifting political contexts.

passage of the coolies’ hats to the americas Although the destinations of Chinese coolies were varied, at the point of departure, the logistics were extremely controlled. The origins of Chinese coolies were clustered first in the two provinces

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of Fujian and Canton. Given the illegality of Chinese trafficking under the Qing dynasty, even though several ports opened after the First Opium War, the final embarkation of the recruited coolies concentrated in locations such as Hong Kong, Macao, and Swatow.16 These controlled logistics were among the main reasons why coolie hats became uniform in look. Legally, Chinese labourers were indentured servants; they signed a contract to work for eight years, written in both Cantonese or Fujian and the destination language. In addition, the recruiters were obliged to give recruited labourers one last chance to reject the contract and leave the ship after boarding the main foreign vessel. However, even before boarding, newly recruited coolies were stripped of their freedom. They were delivered into the hands of recruiters and put into what the non-Chinese called ‘barracoota’, extensive slave camps that were built in the coastal cities of Fujian and Canton.17 They were then transferred to larger camps either in Hong Kong or Macao, two of the few destinations that were easier for foreign vessels to access, with less control and fewer inspections from Chinese officials. Given the shady and forcible nature of the trade, it was crucial to hide the recruited labourers from the rest of the world. The assembled men and boys were treated inhumanly at these camps and were likely stripped of most of their belongings. Moreover, the capital letters of their destination were painted on their bare upper bodies, further marking their low status.18 Most contracts promised coolies two sets of new clothing a year, together with food, shelter, and medical care after they arrived at their final destination.19 16

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Qin lifted the ban against Chinese migrating abroad at the Convention of Peking in 1860. However, human trafficking was considered illegal. Murakami notes that Amoy was another early export centre, though the numbers stagnated after the 1850s revolt. Ei Murakami, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Coolie Trade in Mid-19th Century Amoy’ [in Japanese], Shigaku Zasshi, 118/12 (2009), 2069–105. The article describes in detail the deportation process. Hiroaki Kani, Kindaichu¯goku no Ku¯ri to Choka [Coolie and ‘Zhu hua’ in Modern China] (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 1979), 11–12. https://chineseamericanhistorian.blogspot.com/2014/03/u-s-getting-2500-c hinks-to-work-on.html (accessed 20 November 2020). Evelyn Hu-DeHart, ‘Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor of Neoslavery’, Contributions in Black Studies, 12/1 (1994), 38–54.

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Importantly, they were also provided with conical straw hats and clothing either at the point of recruiting, or in the regional or central barracoota before boarding the sampan vessels, which took the coolies to the main ship.20 One such ocean-going ship carried some 600 to 1,000 coolies and it took about two days to load them on board. An article from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1864 reveals in detail how the coolies were dressed as they boarded the main ship from the sampan boats: The coolies mounted the side one after another, most of them naked to the waist, wearing only the loose coolie trowsers [sic] and broadbrimmed straw hat. Slung at the belt were a pouch and purse, and a little case for the chop-sticks . . . their baggage and persons searched for opium and weapons.21

This description suggests that the coolies wore similar attire at the point of embarking the main ship, and that most of them had conical straw hats, probably the largest possession they were allowed to carry on board. Their garments were already distinguishable, as indicated by the reference to ‘coolie trousers’. Thus, their garments, combined with their hats, signified their bondage status (Figure 29.2). Upon embarkation their treatment was harsh. One record noted that the coolies were stripped naked, their bodies were mopbrushed, and occasionally they even had their queues (bian-fa) cut.22 This process might have been mandated for hygiene; but the treatment was nonetheless humiliating sometimes triggering suicide or revolt, as the cutting of queues was a punishment that 20 21

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Murakami, ‘Rise and Fall of the Coolie Trade’, 2079. ‘A Chapter on the Coolie Trade’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 29 (1864). In March 1852 the American ship Robert Bowne, departing Amoy and heading to San Francisco, was stranded on one of the islands of Ryukyu after the revolt of 400 Chinese coolies on board, killing five American sideship crew, including the captain. The coolies had been incited to revolt because of the physical humiliation they suffered. They were stripped naked, body-washed with coarse brushes and cold water, and had their long bian-fa cut. Moreover, immediately after departure, two unhealthy coolies had been thrown overboard. Kiko¯ Nishizato, ‘Coolie Trade and the Robert Bowne Mutiny Incident: The Reports Presented to the Symposium in Fujian Teachers University’ [in Japanese], Ryukyu Daigaku Kyo¯ikugakubu Kiyo¯, 29 (1986), 92–110.

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Figure 29.2

Coolies illustrated in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1864. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 169 (1864).

meant expulsion from mainland China.23 The change from wearing a hat on top of a bundled long plaited queue, to wearing it 23

Dorothy Ko notes that the cutting of the queues was seen as ‘tonssorial castration’. Dorothy Ko, ‘The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of

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directly on the head with its hard plant fibre rubbing the skin, must have been a constant physical reminder of the wearer’s status of servitude. The harshness of the voyages led to high mortality rates.24 On some ships even a cup of water came at a high price, despite the strong heat from the sun.25 The hats must have been extremely helpful in both mitigating the sun’s glare in making small oases of shade and as a means of keeping a personal space in an overcrowded cabin. Several records of revolts on board ship confirm that the bonded labourers owned such hats. For example the record of the revolt on board the Kate Hooper in 1858 noted that some of the Chinese bonded labourers added their hats to the straw stuffing from their sleeping mattresses, and set them on fire.26 Such action indicates the desperation of the bonded labourers in giving up their only possession to make the blaze. On arrival, many bonded labourers received their first set of garments from the contractors. They were often supplied ‘Chinesestyle’ garments and hats, distributed from their ships’ cargo or from other ships that took the same route from Hong Kong or Macao.27 At this point, the indentured labourers and Chinese voluntary migrants would have worn their assigned headwear; one record of arrival in 1852 noted that ‘the wharf . . . covered [a] long distance with a perfect forest of basket hats and long tails’.28 The bonded labourers were sold and distributed in smaller groups upon arrival and were often immediately taken by the contractors collectively to remote work sites that were constantly

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Footbinding in Seventeenth-Century China’, Journal of Women’s History, 8/ 4 (1997), 20. Setsuko Sonoda, ‘A Study of the 1877–1878 Trans-Pacific Steamship Line Contract Labor Argument’ [in Japanese], Pacific and American Studies, 3 (2003), 131–46. Nishizato, ‘Coolie Trade’, 100. Robert J. Plowman, ‘The Voyage of the “Coolie” Ship Kate Hooper, October 3, 1857–March 26, 1858’, Prologue Magazine, 33/2 (2001), 87–95. Upon arrival at the Peruvian ports, coolies were issued a new set of apparel: ochre-coloured wide trousers, a jacket, Chinese clogs, and a straw hat which was carefully tied under the chin for fear of losing it. Alta California, 28 March 1852. Quoted from Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 54.

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Figure 29.3 Chinese labourers at a railway construction site, 1863–9 or 1886. Sometimes this picture is assumed to have been taken at the construction site of Continental Pacific Railways between 1863 and 1869. However, another source states that this photograph was taken at the switchback near the summit of the Cascades in 1886, at a Northern Pacific Railway construction site. Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW552.

monitored. This situation explains the rather bizarre picture that depicts Chinese bonded labourers working at a snowy mountainous construction site in uniformed Chinese-style garments with conical hats (Figure 29.3). In most cases, Chinese indentured labourers were directly trafficked from Fujian and Canton to their places of work. During the confinement of this indentured labour, bonded workers had few opportunities to shop but relied on company stores opened solely for them that were directly controlled by the contractors, notorious for their high pricing. Workers could buy personal possessions with their small allowance. However, the pricing was often extortionate. One such shop sold a straw hat at a price that exceeded a man’s monthly wage.29 Over time, their attire changed. Archaeological artefacts such as metal buttons, suspender clasps, belt buckles, and leather and rubber fragments of work boots found at Chinese railroad workers’ 29

Kani, Kindaichu¯goku no Ku¯ri to Choka, 63.

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Figure 29.4 Chinese labourers laying the last rail of the first transcontinental railroad, 10 May 1869. Photograph by Andrew J. Russell (1830–1902), a photographer assigned to document construction of the first transcontinental railroad in the late 1860s. Oakland Museum of California, Wikimedia Commons.

camps, suggest that they eventually started wearing Americanstyle trousers and boots for work.30 Another record suggests that, after work, they bathed and changed into fresh clothing, with Chinese-style long blouses and ‘wide straw hats’.31 Early pictures of Chinese railway workers on the California Pacific Railway tend to portray them working in Chinese garments and hats. However, Chinese workers celebrating the completion of the construction around 1869 are shown as wearing a mix of Chinese-style garments, jeans, and felt hats, most of them having shorter hair long before it was adopted in mainland China (Figure 29.4). 30

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Barbara L. Voss, ‘Living between Misery and Triumph: The Material Practices of Chinese Railroad Workers in North America’, in Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (eds.), The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 122; P. G. Evans and W. S. Chace, ‘Celestial Sojourners in the High Sierras: The Ethno-Archaeology of Chinese Railroad Workers (1865–1868)’, Historical Archaeology, 49 (2015), 27–33. Evans and Chace, ‘Celestial Sojourners’, 28.

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In summary, the uniformity of the conical sedge hats among coolies at the point of embarkation, during the voyage, on arrival at various destinations, and even at respective labour sites can be attributed to the single route and controlled logistics. They were not obliged to have a specific hat. However, the hat was used at the Chinese barracootas and on board the ships to identify them and was among the few things they were allowed to carry during the voyage, as their luggage was extremely limited. This control continued after their arrival as the logistics of their daily supplies were controlled by employers. Upon arrival, Chinese coolies adopted local and mixed styles of dress, expanding their choice of garments and hats where they could. These choices were set amidst a closely controlled supply chain for basic necessities like apparel. The flow of Chinese coolies to the Americas continued in the 1880s to Canada, but the numbers diminished with the dramatic decrease of Chinese migration to Peru, Cuba, and the United States. However, coolie hats did not disappear. It is recorded that almost all the Japanese and Okinawan migrants who arrived in Hawaii in January 1900 purchased coolie clothes and hats before boarding the ships bound for Hawaii at the transit points of Kobe or Yokohama via the migration agent.32 Working mostly in the agricultural plantations, these workers before long started to wear flannel check shirts and jeans, similar to those worn by local Hawaiians. From the same source it is confirmed that garments and hats called ‘coolie hats and clothes’ were sold in East Asian ports – not only in Hong Kong or Macau where Chinese coolies initially went, but also in the transit ports of Kobe or Yokohama. It was customary for East Asian migrants who were expected to engage in manual labour outside to wear these assigned garments as late as 1900.

coolie hats among changing hat production in china, 1840–1920 Between 1840 and 1880 there was a transformation in straw hat production in East Asia, a period marked by dynamic expansion. 32

Barbara F. Kawakami, Japanese Immigrant Clothing in Hawaii, 1885–1941 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995).

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Historians have emphasized the export-oriented straw plait and unfinished hat products initiated by British, French, German, and American capitalists in Shandong and Zhejiang, and the competition of these industries with Japan. However, it is important to note that domestic consumption in China continued growing from the late nineteenth century. It is often noted that the consumption of hats in China was particularly marked after the December 1911 Chinese revolution (Xinhai Revolution), after which many Chinese started to abandon the queue hairstyle. Indeed, expecting a boom in hat consumption, like that after the Japanese Haircut Law of 1871, Japan heavily marketed its domestically successful hats to China. However, though Japan initially succeeded in selling their winter hats in the early months of 1912, the turnover of their highly promising summer hats (straw hats and imitation Panama hats) in the Chinese market turned out to be a disappointment. This was not due to the later boycott of Japanese products which intensified in the latter half of the 1910s, but more to the ignorance of Japanese marketers of the Chinese hat dress code that had been established by then. 　Straw hats had been produced widely in China within an expansive cottage industry well before the 1840s. In the south, various types of sedge straws were plaited to make mats and hats. Moreover, in the northern wheat-growing areas, wheat straw braids and hats were made. In Northern Shandong province, a major local industry for plaiting straw and making hats for the Chinese was already in full operation well before the port of Chefoo was forced to open to foreign trade in 1862, making hats for the hot and humid areas in China, such as Fujian near Hong Kong.33 Thus, a long-distance trade of straw hats between northern and southern areas in China was in practice before the industry turned to exporting its wares outside China. Nevertheless, in the 1860s, the opening of the Chinese ports transformed the straw hat industry. Hong Kong was the first to get wind of European-style straw hat styles, and areas near Fujian started their production around 1858–60. The centres of hat 33

Chinyun Lee, ‘The Entry into the World Market of Chinese Straw Braids’, Far East/Dálný východ, 6/1 (2016), 20–1.

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Map 29.1 Two regions, Zhejiang province near Ningpo, and Shanghai and Northern Shandong province, stood out as centres for production and export.

production quickly moved northward. Two regions, Zhejiang province near Ningbo, and Shanghai and Northern Shandong province, were important centres for production and export (Map 29.1). In the Zhejiang region, the destruction of local textile industries due to the influx of European cotton textiles led to a growth in sedge straw hat production. This rural area quickly sought to remedy job losses by shifting towards hat-making.34 Waste products of sedge mat manufacture were employed in hat production.35 Sedge hats were exported as early as 1868 from this area, and, in 1877, a British consular report recorded exports of 15 million straw hats.36 With the expansion of production, wood plaits were imported from Japan, Taiwan, and Madagascar for hat production.37 Hat manufacturing was also concentrated in 34 35

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Benno, Kachu¯ no¯son Keizai to kindaika, 238–43. Sedge is the translation of ikusa here. Local wheat straw was also used, but very little. G. C. Allen and Audrey G. Donnithorne, Western Enterprise in Far Eastern Economic Development (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). Wood plaits were broadly used for straw hat production in East Asia. China imported Japanese wood plaits in the latter half of the 1910s. Wood plait hats were around double the cost of sedge hats, as workers could produce three sedge hats per day but only two wood plait hats per day. To¯a Do¯bunkai, Shina sho¯betsu zenshi (Tokyo: To¯a Do¯bunkai, 1920), 657.

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Ningbo, in which French firms directly invested.38 Before the First World War, most of the products from Ningbo were exported via Shanghai to France. Hat shapes were adapted and hats were decorated with silk, cotton, feathers, and artificial flowers. According to the 1912 British consular report, the French marketed these hats as ‘leghorns, Panama, and manillas’.39 The port continued exporting straw hats en masse until the commencement of the First World War and continued long after. Ningbo accounted for 90–98 per cent of the export share of straw hats in the 1910s, 70–80 per cent during the First World War, and then 90 per cent until 1928.40 Shandong, a region with a long tradition of straw hat production in China, started to export wheat straw braids in volume to world markets in the mid-nineteenth century.41 The local industry was transformed by British firms operating in the area from the 1860s. German, Russian, and American firms followed. Trade at the port of Chefoo grew 6.7 times larger in the period 1867–1905. Straw plaits became the main export commodity from the 1880s. Between and 1880 and 1894, an annual average of 2.5 million kg (2,500t) of straw plaits were exported. The year 1887 saw the peak, and straw plaits occupied one-third of the total exports.42 After the ports of Qingdao, Weihai, and Dalian opened as a result of First Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), and Germany initiated the lease contract of Qingdao in 1898, Qingdao became the next centre of straw plait export.43 Chefoo’s straw plait export was half that of Qingdao in the early 1920s; nonetheless, it continued to export to the main

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Allen and Donnithorne (Western Enterprise) noted that at the turn of the twentieth century, most hats were not made of local sedge. However, in 1912 and 1913 sedge hat exports were nine to ten times (10,804,525 and 5,328,049 pieces) more than wood plait hats (1,106,875 and 1,305,492 pieces). Ibid., 88, n.1; British Diplomatic and Consular Reports on Trade, 5201, Ningbo, 1912, 10. At this stage most were sold to the United States. Lee, ‘Entry into the World Market’, 20–1. Yuxi Luan, ‘The Economic Growth in Shandong Is Due to the Development of the Coastal Cities of Qingdao, Yantai, and Weihai’, Journal of Economics of Kwansei Gakuin University, 62/4 (2009), 57–96. Fion Wai Ling So, Germany’s Colony in China: Colonialism, Protection and Economic Development in Qingdao and Shandong, 1898–1914 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).

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straw hat production areas in Europe, America, and the Philippines.44 Although the export-oriented aspect of the industry is highlighted in port trade records, mass production also relied on the popularization of straw hats in the domestic market. Straw hats and straw plait production expanded further inland. Isabella Lucy Bird, who travelled from Sial-kiao to Hsuieh Tein tze in the western inland region in 1894, noted that ‘the farmhouses in that region were made of mud, [a] thatched roof, and looked poor. Straw plaiting and the making of the very large straw hats, which the coolies wear in summer [made up] the great industries.’45 Contemporaries noted that ‘these straw hats became so cheap that they were available even for coolies’.46 Regarding Zhejiang hats, the Japanese consular report of 1920 noted that ‘hats pleased the [domestic manual] labourers, as they were cheap and extremely convenient for summer’, and there was an expansion of ‘its supply to the lower stratum of the society’. Thus, coolies could afford to purchase straw hats. We assume that the straw hats were in different varieties by this time, using different materials such as sedge, wood, bamboo, and wheat straw. While popularized straw hats were worn by coolies, the types of hats that truly grew in this period in China were not straw hats but all-season or winter felt hats. That is, there was a clear tendency among many Chinese consumers to avoid straw hats from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, such was the cultural negative weight of the coolie hat. This tendency was strongest in Hong Kong, the export centre of coolies and their hats. In his 1838 book, published shortly before the start of the First Opium War, and as coolie trade intensified, Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff, a German Lutheran missionary who stayed in Macao and Hong Kong noted: ‘Most people go bare-headed, protecting themselves from the rays of the sun by a fan; some wear thin 44

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Tanaka Shu¯zo¯, ‘Geology and Geography near Chefoo’ [in Japanese], Journal of Geography, 35/6 (1923), 40. Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and beyond: An Account of Journeys in China (London: John Murray, 1899). She travelled the area in c. 1894. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003).

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conical straw caps, and labourers, very large straw hats. Their caps worn [in] winter are far more varied, being made of felt, and shaped in different forms, but they are never as large as our hats.’47 Seventy-five years later in 1913, the Japanese consulate of Hong Kong made similar comments.48 That year, Japan was devastated by a complete collapse in the marketing of Japanese summer hats for China, most prominently imitation Panama hats. Japan had had enormous success with winter hats in the previous season, and thus expected a huge demand for summer hats. The report says: It was only recently that Chinese-targeted demand for hats has risen. As all Chinese cut their queue after the Chinese Revolution for several months, the sales of various hats went unprecedentedly high, prices increased two to three times higher, and every last stock from samples to leftovers in Japan was sold. As winter hats were sold by this much, we expected the summer hats sales to be high and imported en masse in China. Traditionally, this region’s Chinese wore either hats or umbrellas in the winter season from the lowest coolies to the highest in social ranks. However, during the summer season, despite the strong sun rays, hats were not worn except for coolies, and it was the custom to hold fans up on their heads and walk out [on the] streets. Thus, the highly expected demand for summer hats did not materialise, the prices dropped considerably, and hats were sold at a sacrifice.49

The same extensive report of 1913 confirms the development of various hat preferences in different regions.50 Colonial intervention clearly left its mark. In northern Harbin, Panama hats were not popular. They did not go well with Chinese-style clothing, and ‘Russians’ were not in favour of them. In Shandong, Panama hats

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China Opened; Or, A Display of the Topography, History, Customs, Manners, Arts, Manufactures, Commerce, Literature, Religion, Jurisprudence, etc. of the Chinese Empire, Vol. 1. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1838), 481. Taiwan So¯tokuhu Shokusankyoku, Rinto¯bo¯ Seizo¯gyo¯ Cho¯sa [Investigation on Screwpine Production] (Taipei: Government General of Taiwan Civil Affairs Bureau, 1915). Ibid., Appendix: ‘Mozo¯ Panamabo ni kansuru Kaiga Kakuchi Teikoku Ryoji Ho¯koku’ [Reports from the Various Japanese Consulates on the Imitation Panama Hats], 41–2. Ibid., 1–39.

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did not become popular as Germans who colonized part of the province did not wear them. The Japanese were very hopeful of success with their newly invented imitation Panama hats, made of paper, in the recently opened Chinese hat market. However, after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, a massive boycott of Japanese products occurred all over China. Japanese straw hats were among the main targets. The Japanese media depicted ‘not wearing Japanese summer straw hats’ as symbols of Chinese absurdity: the Asahi Shimbun (Asahi newspaper) noted on 29 May 1920 that ‘the outcome of the boycott is absurd [as] Chinese people in Shanghai [wear] winter hats in the middle of summer’.51 Since Japan went through a series of summer hat booms and promoted summer hat exports, it was difficult for them to understand how Chinese people could live without summer hats. By the 1930s, Japanese hat exports to China shifted to targeting low-quality felt hats. A 1931 Japanese trade report admitted that the Chinese controlled the summer straw hat markets. Further, Japan struggled to increase its share of felt hats, as Italy was dominant in the high-quality segment, and Japan was forced to compete with Chinese production in the lower quality segment.52 A mass of these Chinese-produced straw hats travelled to Europe with the Chinese Labour Corps during the First World War and further disseminated the association of the coolie hat with Chinese labourers. Between 1917 and 1921, in the hope of retrieving its territories in Shandong, China sent some 37,000 to 50,000 contracted labourers to France and 94,500 to the United Kingdom. Most of them came from Shandong. Here again, the labourers were issued with summer and winter ‘native-style’ non-army type clothing.53 They continued wearing several of these items in 51

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Dan Hong, ‘Opinions in the Japanese Journalism about May Fourth Movement’ [in Japanese], International Public Policy Studies, 11/2 (2007), 183–94. Sho¯ko¯ Sho¯ Bo¯eki Kyoku, Kaigai Shijo¯ ni okeru Honpo¯ Yushutsu Bo¯shi oyobi Do¯zairyo¯ no Jukyu¯ narabi Gaikokuhin tono Kyo¯so¯ Jo¯kyo¯ [The Situations of Competitions between Hats Exported from Japan and Foreign Countries in Overseas Markets, and Demand and Supply of Materials] (Tokyo: Sho¯ko¯ Sho¯ Bo¯eki Kyoku, 1931), 1–11. Shirley Frey, ‘The Chinese Labor Corps in the First World War: Forgotten Allies and Political Pawns’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Texas Arlington, 2010).

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Europe, as it was necessary for the Chinese Labour Corps to be instantly recognized as Chinese civilians. At the recruiting station in Shandong province, those who passed the medical examination were given uniforms (dark blue tunics, dark blue trousers, straw hats, and hatbands marked ‘CLC’) before marching out to ships bound for Vancouver, Canada, the transit point through which most Chinese passed before arriving at the French or Belgian battlefield.54 Pictures of the recruiting centres show that the applicants were wearing varieties of straw hats at the point of inspection. They were given additional straw hats or hatbands and ribbons with a mark to distinguish them (Figure 29.5).55 Chinese recruits continued wearing various types of straw hats made in China while they worked in Europe, even when their work was indoors in a British ammunition factory.56 In addition, those recruited for France were provided with a fur-lined cap made of brown felt, with ear-flaps of grey fur, commonly called the ‘Shandong hat’.57 According to Brian C. Fawcett, these hats were specially modelled, based on similar hats worn by British troops in the North China garrisons. Among those living in Shandong, it was unthinkable for Chinese manual labourers to wear European colonizer-related hats. However, Chinese indentured labourers, working beyond borders, transcended those taboos. Upon arrival in Europe, some continued wearing the hats they had been issued with in China, and others obtained items such as ‘civilian cloth caps, Australian bush hats, French Army kepis, and even steel helmets’.58 In summary, coolie hat production was closely connected with expanding Chinese hat production and consumption between 1870 54

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Suzanne Ma, ‘Chinese Recruited for War Had Secret Passage through Canada’, CTV News, Bell Media, 11 November 2011: www.ctvnews.ca/chinese-recruit ed-for-war-had-secret-passage-through-canada-1.723974 (accessed 27 August 2020). David Livingstone, photograph of a doctor of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, examining Chinese recruits, 1917 in On the Ways of the Great War, http://virtualexhibition.1418remembered.co.uk/explore/chinese-workers/ in-china/1916-start-of-the-recruitment.html (accessed 27 August 2020). See www.smithsonianmag.com/history/surprisingly-important-role-chinaplayed-world-war-i-1809645321 (accessed 2 June 2021). Brian C. Fawcett, ‘The Chinese Labour Corps in France, 1917–1921’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 40 (2000), 33–111. Ma, ‘Chinese Recruited for War’.

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Figure 29.5 Chinese Labour Corps at a roll-call in France during the First Word War. Alamy Stock Photo, MBJYKB. National Library of Scotland, Digital gallery, https://digital.nls.uk/74548708.

and 1920. The straw hats were broadly consumed by the lower segments of society, but this fashion also encouraged other strata of urban society to avoid straw hats, which affected the course of importation of foreign headwear. Mass recruitment of the Chinese Labour Corps reinforced the association of straw hats with Chinese migrant workers.

coolies’ hats in british malaya, 1870–1920 After the 1870 regulations limited the transport of contracted immigrants to only the British colonies, Malaysia and Singapore became the top destinations for Chinese immigrants, exceeding the United States as a destination after 1877.59 By 1878, more than half of the emigrants from Hong Kong headed to British Malaya, and from the mid-1880s, the destination of 70–80 per cent of the

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Kani, Kindaichu¯goku no Ku¯ri to Choka, 58–69.

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40,000 to 70,000 annual emigrants was British Malaya, while the Dutch East Indies also absorbed a considerable number of coolies. The opening of steamship lines facilitated the flow. With the constant and massive flow of Chinese labourers, China continued exporting straw hats (called coolie hats locally throughout the 1870–1940 period) en masse to Southeast Asia. Gibson-Hill, an ethnologist and doctor who stayed in British Malaya from the 1940s to the 1950s (and later became the director of the Raffles Museum), conducted a cross-cultural analysis of Chinese labourers’ hats worn in Malaya.60 He confirmed the hats to be of Chinese origins: the earlier ones having different crowns which reflected various Chinese locations; but the later hats exported from Hong Kong were remarkably uniform in their finish (Figure 29.6) According to Gibson-Hill, no serious attempts were made to imitate the shape of the Chinese hats in British Malaya despite the abundance of suitable materials and the constant demand for the coolie hats. He argued that social distinction and discrimination, particularly against coolies, was the reason that no major straw hat industry appeared in British Malaya.61 The social distinction, Gibson-Hill mentioned, was the strong colonial hierarchy British Malay society maintained between ‘Coolies and servants’ and ‘the others’. Hats materialized this hierarchy and were the most common medium indicating this distinction. In describing male dress codes for a Ministry of Commerce handbook for British Malaya, J. A. Fowler noted the difference between coolies who wore the typical straw hats and ‘Europeans, half-castes, and the Chinese of classes above the coolies and house boys’ who wore either sola topees, sun helmets, or double-felt hats as day wear, but no straw hats.62 As in Hong Kong, a strong trend was established among locals in not wearing the distinctive straw hat in British Malaya or Singapore.

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Carl Alexander Gibson-Hill, ‘The Chinese Laborers’ Hats Used in Malaya’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 25/1/158 (1952), 35–47. Ibid. John A. Fowler, Netherlands East Indies and British Malaya: A Commercial and Industrial Handbook (Washington, DC: United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, 1923), 346

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Figure 29.6 Illustration of Chinese labourers’ hats. From Carl Alexander Gibson-Hill, ‘The Chinese Laborers’ Hats Used in Malaya’ (1952).

The dress code law set in Singapore in the 1890s for rickshaw coolies strengthened the tradition of coolies wearing ‘coolie hats’ (Figure 29.7). This law required rickshaw coolies, who ‘run on the streets naked from the waist up’, to be more

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Figure 29.7 Battery Road, Singapore, with the Dispensary on the left, and rickshaw pullers, c. 1930. Hulton-Deutsch Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images.

clothing-conscious.63 By 1914, rickshaw pullers had a uniform of ‘the traditional garb’: straw hats, tight-fitting ‘coolie’ blue shorts or baggy black pants, and a coat shirt for the upper torso. A retired rickshaw puller who worked between 1920 and 1930 mentioned that pullers at this time were still obliged to wear a hat, ‘a straw one’. A 1926 report by R. H. J. Sydney, the headmaster of a high school in Malaysia, confirmed that the typical coolie hat shapes continued to be worn. He described coolies’ head-coverings as ‘usually a basket hat, fairly wide in the brim and going to a point in the middle – cone-shaped’. At the same time, he mentions some varieties to be observed. Some hats had different crown shapes; some coolies wore ordinary felt hats (very old and battered) and Japanese straws.64 The retired 63

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James Francis Warren, Rickshaw Coolie: A People’s History of Singapore, 1880–1940 (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2003). R. H. J. Sydney, Malay Land (London: Cecil Palmer, 1926).

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rickshaw puller recollected that coolies wore old-fashioned widebrim straw rain hats or large split bamboo hats that were closer to the hats of Southeast Asian origin. Thus, the Chinese coolie hats changed in response to the varied hat production in Southeast and East Asia: the traditional, but more massproduced and popularized Chinese straw hats, the Chinese felt hats whose production expanded with the rejection of Japanese straw hats in mainland China, those rejected Japanese straw hats themselves, or local split bamboo hats. These coolies were, in a sense, true consumers of the newly produced East Asian and Southeast Asian headwear. In contrast, the other European and Chinese (non-coolie) urban residents in British Malaya were obstinately reluctant to use straw, sedge, pandan, bamboo, or other plant-fibre straw hats. Often this reluctance was attributed to climate conditions: the harsh sun made people prefer helmets to any type of straw hat during the day. However, this explanation is only partially persuasive without recognizing the colonial hierarchy materialized in the hats. From the late 1860s, export industries of bamboo hats and pandan summer hats greatly expanded in the neighbouring Dutch East Indies, targeting the US and French markets, with Chinese straw hats and Japanese imitation Panama hats.65 These products were abundantly available in British Malaya because they were distributed via Singapore and Hong Kong, the two centres of Chinese coolies. Yet local urban upper and middle classes steadfastly rejected these iconic summer hats. Japanese exporters were disappointed by the stagnant exports of imitation Panama hats to Singapore in the 1920s. They noted that Panama hats were only worn in Singapore in the evening and only among Chinese residents. They were frustrated that their imitation Panama hats were not well received by the local urban consumers of Southeast Asia. In contrast imitation Panama hats were successful in the 1910– 20 period in Japan, Europe, and the United States. Accordingly, the Japanese tended to regard them as a universally notable product that met the demand of the urban residents who aspired to be 65

They also produced imitation Panama hats made of pandan fibre. These hats were exported with 5.75 million pandan hats and 4.11 million bamboo hats shipped out in 1919. Fowler, Netherlands East Indies.

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fashionable. However, this situation did not apply to colonial societies in Southeast Asia. In contrast, the export of Chinese hats, closely linked with the export of various ‘coolie hats’, continued to be stable till the 1930s. A United States consular report of 1932 noted that the summer hats in the Siamese market were ‘distinctly low priced, with many different varieties in demand, that originated in the Netherlands East Indies, Japan, and China’.66 The items in greatest demand in Siam then were not straw, sedge, pandan, or bamboo hats but felt hats and sun helmets. All the hats were imported to Siam via Singapore and British Malaya.67 Solar topee hats were imported from Europe and India. High-class felt hats were exported from Europe, in particular Italy, but China and Japan expanded the export of low-quality felt hats.68 However, the third-largest import in Siam was imported ‘coolie hats’ of straw, with a wide brim and flattened crown from China, which were used primarily among Chinese workers in Siam. Thus, although Siam was not colonized, the colonial pattern of Singapore and British Malaya was instated there linking coolies’ hats. The wave of coolies, as well as the varied hat production and consumption in Southeast Asia, were suspended by the invasion of the Japanese into China and Southeast Asia in the late 1930s. Contemporary reports note that hat production in mainland China, the Philippines, and the Netherlands ceased. Japan continued exploiting coolies as a workforce for their imperial enterprises and these men were mainly recruited from Shandong and transported to northern Manchuria. Migration in northeastern China grew in the 1920s and equalled the migration flow to the United States, as sending Chinese coolies to Southeast Asia was prohibited. In the late 1930s, Japan also adopted aggressive measures to expand hat exports. In Japan’s eyes, the refusal of Japanese or Asian produced summer hats by the Chinese or Malayan people equated to their subordination to colonial European powers. The 66

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US Department of Commerce, Consular and Trade Reports (Washington, DC: Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Manufactures, 1932), 221. Thus, locally produced hats were limited to either caps for the police and military forces or inexpensive straw hats of the sailor-brim type used by schoolboys, both of which were imported. Bo¯eki Kyoku, Kaigai Shijo¯.

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‘Southern Co-prosperity Spheres’ proposal for military-ruled Southeast Asian areas included the introduction of the new ‘Taiwanese hat’, a hat that merged elements of imitation Panama hats, helmets, and felt hats. A poster notes ‘Taiwanese hats, the hats of Asia’ in both Malay and Chinese (Figure 29.8).69 In northeastern

Figure 29.8 Poster for ‘Taiwanese hats, the hats of Asia’. From Kinosuke Koike, Taiwan Bo¯shi no Hanashi (Tale of Taiwanese Hats) (Taipei: Taiwan Sanseido¯, 1943).

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Koike Kinnosuke, Taiwan Bo¯shi no Hanashi (Taipei: Taiwan Sanseido¯, 1943), 3; Ko Ikujo, ‘Gender, Social Stratification, and Empire: The “Japan Era” Experienced by Taiwanese Women in Hat Manufacture’ [in Japanese], Gengo Bunka, 55 (2019), 36.

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Manchuria, Japanese colonial immigrants were often described by local people as ‘fully dressed and wearing hats’. In contrast, Shandong coolies in Manchuria were no longer noted for their hats, but rather the rags they wore to protect against harsh winter weather. In many parts of China, cotton and felt caps proliferated, indicating their solidarity and resistance to the Japanese invasion.

conclusion Tracing the trajectories surrounding coolie hat production, this chapter highlights three impacts of this important accessory. First, between 1840 and 1940, China continued to produce most Chinese coolie hats. However, as I have shown, this did not mean only one particular type of hat was produced. Second, the forms and varieties of coolie hats changed and grew, adjusting to global production. Long before the change in hairstyles from queues to shorter cuts, which has been pinpointed as the major trigger for the growth in consumption, coolies were by necessity avid hat wearers. The case studies in this chapter demonstrate that coolies were pioneering consumers. Third, coolies influenced the consumption pattern of hats in China and Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Coolie hats shifted the political culture of hat use across broad global locales.

select bibliography Benno Saiichi, Kachu¯ no¯son Keizai to kindaika (Rural Villages of Central China and Modernization) (Tokyo: Kyu¯ko shoin, 2004). Chinyun Lee, ‘The Entry into the World Market of Chinese Straw Braids’, Far East/Dálný východ, 6/1 (2016), 18–32. Driscoll, Mark, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Gibson-Hill, Carl Alexander, ‘The Chinese Laborers’ Hats Used in Malaya’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 25/1/158 (1952), 35–47. Jung, Moon-Ho, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Kani, Hiroaki, Kindaichu¯goku no Ku¯ri to Choka (Coolie and ‘Zhu hua’ in Modern China) (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 1979).

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chinese coolie hats Kawakami, Barbara F., Japanese Immigrant Clothing in Hawaii, 1885– 1941 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995). Ko, Dorothy, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Lee, Peter, Sarong Kebaya: Peranakan Fashion in an Interconnected World, 1500–1950 (Singapore: Asian Civilisation Museum, 2014). McKeown, Adam, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Warren, Jim, ‘The Singapore Rickshaw Pullers: The Social Organization of a Coolie Occupation, 1880–1940’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 16/1 (1985), 1–15.

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CRUMBLING EMPIRES AND EMERGING NATIONS Fashion in Europe, c. 1860–1914 jonathan c. kaplan-wajselbaum Europe of the nineteenth century was a continent wracked by numerous wars, revolutions, and other political upheavals. From the continent-wide Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) in the aftermath of the French Revolution, to the countless battles and skirmishes that took place on local or regional scales, the nineteenth century was a period not only of political and social upheaval, but also one of industrialization, increased urbanization, and cross-cultural exchange. It was during this century that earlier ideas of nation were cemented, helped in no small part by, and in many cases responsible for, the many conflicts that played out across the continent. While ideas of national or ethnic difference were by no means novel, they were consolidated during this century.1 The nineteenth century was also an age of imperial grandeur during which European powers flexed their muscles both on the continent and abroad further developing ideas about nation and national identity. Britain finally consolidated its rule in India and formally incorporated it into its empire with the establishment of the

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See for example Joost Augusteijn and Eric Strom (eds.), Region and State in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building Regional Identities and Separatism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski and Andrej Marcin Suszycki, The Nation and Nationalism in Europe: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Tove H. Malloy (ed.), Minority Issues in Europe: Rights, Concepts, Policy (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2013); Yael Tamir, Why Nationalism (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2019), esp. Part II: ‘Love and Marriage: The Virtues of Nationalism’.

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British Raj (1858). Austria, having been defeated by Prussia in 1866, was excluded from the emerging German nation, and having to contend with its vast and multi-ethnic population signed the historic compromise (Ausgleich) with Hungary creating the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary that lasted until 1918. New nations were born out of consolidating various kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and free cities (Italy 1861, Germany 1871), or by throwing off the shackles of other masters (Greece 1822, Belgium 1830–1, Serbia 1878, Romania 1881). Others were not as fortunate and continued to strive for independence and assert their national culture and character while living under the yoke of foreign masters – notably Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Prussia. During this period of rising national consciousness, fashionable clothing and accessories were used for multiple purposes. In different political and cultural contexts, ethnic dress styles were utilized to express particular ideas about nation – sometimes in line with reigning powers and sometimes against them.2 The ubiquity of military uniforms, as a result of the constant wars and revolutions that kept soldiers in the public eye, plus aspects of military uniform, would exert an influence on civilian dress fashions. Similarly, as interest in ‘authentic’ national cultures grew, the popularization of ‘national’ or ‘folk’ dress emerged, resulting in new forms of sartorial fashions. But perhaps one of the most poignant and possibly ironic aspects of fashion during the age of empire and nationalism was the permanence and strength of standardized European attire, with its French (female) and English (male) associations. The nineteenth century is a rich period for research into fashions, in no small part because of the so-called ‘democratization’ of fashion through new models of consumption across class, territorial, and temporal boundaries, and the wealth of visual material made possible by the mass press.3 Equally important were new 2

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Werner Telesko, ‘Uniformity and National Fashions in the European Context after the Fall of the First French Empire’, in Cathérin Hug and Christoph Becker (eds.), Fashion Drive: Extreme Clothing in the Visual Arts (Bielefeld: Kunsthaus Zürich and Kerber Culture, 2018), 133. See Kate Nelson Best, The History of Fashion Journalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 15–44. On the development of mass press and its intersection with economic interests during the nineteenth century, see, for

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D. OF Frankfurt Crakow Lemberg Prague Paris LUXEMBOURG Strasbourg Vienna Pressburg Odessa REPUBLIC OF Munich AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE Jassy FRANCE Zurich Buda Pest KINGDOM OF PORTUGAL SWITZ. Lyon Trieste Agram Bordeaux Geneva PRINCIPALITY Milan Belgrade Venice Bucharest OF ROMANIA P. OF Oporto Genoa BULGARIA SERBIA Sofia Marseille KINGDOM OF SPAIN OT TO M A N Constantinople Barcelona Rome Madrid Lisbon Salonica Naples EM PIR Valencia E BOSNIAGranada HERZEGOVINA Athens Tanger Algiers MONTENEGRO Oran

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Map 30.1 Europe in 1878 showing national borders after the AustroHungarian occupation of the Ottoman territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

manufacturing technologies that afforded the industrialized mass production of ready-made and made-to-measure clothing that were disseminated through the press.4 This chapter focuses on the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth until the First World War, which saw the dissolution of empires and the emergence of new nation-states (Map 30.1). This

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example, Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 181–96. Claudia B. Kidwell and Margaret C. Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974); Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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chapter examines examples from military attire, ethnic dress, and the influence of Paris and London fashions in different cultural and political contexts, with special focus on the multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic Austro-Hungarian Empire. The different approaches to fashionable appearance during the period, whether embracing national particularism or following ‘foreign’ styles, was not specific to any particular nation, ethnicity, or linguistic group, but rather a Europe-wide phenomenon. Dress was an important tool for situating oneself in wider society and a way of indicating to the self, as much as to others, who one was and where one stood.5

military uniforms Perhaps one of the most distinct influences on fashions during this century of revolution, war, and empire was the military uniform. The high visibility of military men throughout Europe – either those associated with hegemonic powers or revolutionaries – meant that the splendour of standardized uniforms was in constant view and would thus come to influence civilian fashions.6 Theorists and historians of the uniform have argued over its varied symbolic meanings, but many agree on the uniform’s transformative powers. By donning a uniform – whether military, professional, or civic – the wearer comes to embody the ideals that uniform represents.7 For this reason, philosophers and writers, politicians, monarchs, and military leaders recognized the importance of the uniform in creating unity among groups of people. The standardization of European military uniforms (as opposed to standardized equipment for soldiers) has been traced to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as a way of maintaining control and fostering both an image of power and a semblance of

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Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress & Modern Social Theory, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 35. Jennifer Craik, ‘The Cultural Politics of the Uniform’, Fashion Theory, 7/2 (2003), 133–4; Alison Matthews David, ‘Decorated Men: Fashioning the French Soldier, 1852–1914’, Fashion Theory, 7/1 (2003), 3–37. Jennifer Craik, Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 3–18.

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equality among their wearers.8 From France, standardized military uniforms spread across the continent, both the idea and actual sartorial styles. Certainly, during the Napoleonic era and the redrawing of national borders that followed, French military uniforms would influence those of other states, exerting a similar influence as France’s immense wealth, as well as its cultural and military hegemony. Beyond the battlefield and the presence of soldiers in their particular domestic contexts, the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) was a catalyst for disseminating varying military attires, as well as civil dress, to a wider ‘pan-European’ audience. In the wake of Napoléon’s defeat and the Treaty of Paris in May 1814, the leaders of Europe met in Vienna in order to redraw the political map of Europe. The congress was important for showcasing the fashions (both civilian and military) of varying European elites as well as perpetuating new fashions that would be brought back to the participants’ home countries.9 Even long after Napoléon’s defeat, France continued to exert influence on military attire and wider dress fashions. An 1867 issue of Der Kamerad, a bi-weekly Austrian military journal, published an anonymously authored article bemoaning the unsuitability and unfashionability of Austrian uniforms.10 The author attested to the significance of the military uniform for unifying Austria’s diverse population and armed forces, a goal they felt the current uniforms did not achieve. In contrast to those of the Austrian armed forces, the author referred to the uniforms of 8

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Thomas S. Abler, Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress: European Empires and Exotic Uniforms (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Alexander Maxwell, Patriots against Fashion: Clothing and Nationalism in Europe’s Age of Revolutions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 62–3; Anja Meyerrose, Herren im Anzug: Eine transatlantische Geschichte von Klassengesellschaften im langen 19. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2016), 122. See Monica Kunzel-Runtscheiner, ‘The Magic of the Uniform: Dress Codes, Fashion Dictates, and the Spread of Civilian Uniforms through the Congress of Vienna’, in Hug and Becker (eds.), Fashion Drive, 150–7. Auguste Louis Charles Comte de La Garde-Chambonas (1783–c. 1853) wrote extensively of his time in Vienna during the congress with great detail given to the dress of other participants. See Comte A. de La Garde-Chambonas, Anecdotal Recollections of the Congress of Vienna, trans. Albert D. Vandam (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902). ‘Die neue Adjustirung’, Der Kamerad: Oesterreichische Militär-Zeitung, 6/ 61 (30 July 1867), 585–6.

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Russia, England, and France which she or he claimed were not only successful in creating the desired sense of decorum and discipline, but also followed wider fashions in positively influencing the selfworth of their wearers.11 While the uniformed French officer in his immaculately tailored tunic and tight breeches (later trousers), medals and resplendent trimmings, epaulettes and aiguillettes had symbolized military might and masculine virility in the Napoleonic period and its aftermath, by the second half of the nineteenth century it had come to represent degeneracy, perversity, and effeminate weakness. The source, as Allison Matthews David convincingly asserts, was a combination of this figure’s influence on and adoption by women’s fashion, changing societal attitudes towards masculinity and fashionable dress, and France’s defeat by Prussia in the FrancoPrussian War (1870–1).12 In times of wars and other conflicts, the popularity and fashion for military attire was heightened. Details of military uniforms would influence civilian fashions particularly in trims, braiding, frogging, and epaulettes on coats and jackets for both men and women. Uniforms of various armies exerted a similar influence, such as those of Polish Uhlans, Hungarian Hussars, and the FrancoAlgerian Zouaves, with most armies of Europe as well as that of the United States of America creating their own units with the same designation and variations on their uniforms over the centuries.13 The Zouave were particularly influential beyond the context of military attire, also exerting sway in wider dress fashions as part of the European taste for Ottoman styles during the latter half of the century (Figure 30.1).14 While men’s dress took on a more sober appearance from the 1860s, details of military uniforms would still impact upon European men’s appearances, such as hair and facialhairstyles.15 This proved significant as it enabled men, even those who were not enlisted, to utilize the fastidiousness of the military 11 13 14

15

12 Ibid., 585. Matthews David, ‘Decorated Men’. See Abler, Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress. Charlotte A. Jirousek, Ottoman Dress and Design in the West: A Visual History of Cultural Exchange (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 206–12. Matthews David, ‘Decorated Men’, 9.

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Figure 30.1 Portrait of Tache I. Bilciurescu and Anastasia Vasile Ză nescu, who wears a Zouave jacket, by Atelier Charles Szathmari, Bucharest, c. 1860s. National Library of Romania, INV. 278.

man’s appearance and its associations with discipline and decorum for their own self-fashioning. Even in times of relative peace, uniforms were common. In Austria-Hungary, for example, where conscription of three years’ active service and nine years’ reserve was legalized in 1868,16 the ubiquity of uniforms was notable throughout the cityscape. At ceremonies of state or society events male members of the nobility and military elite appeared in gala uniforms. Such attire was also 16

Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 357.

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on display at large pageants through the capital cities (Vienna and Budapest), as well as the general presence of off-duty officers in uniform throughout the cities and garrison towns. Even Vienna’s urban redevelopment in the post-1848 era was influenced by the military, with barracks located strategically throughout the city and the Ringstrasse built to a scale to accommodate troop mobility in the event of revolution or war.17 What made the Habsburg Dual Monarchy significant in contrast to well-established and emerging nation-states was its supranational character. Unlike France and Germany, ‘Austria’ represented the idea of supranational dynastic loyalty. The Austro-Hungarian armed forces thus played a vital role in perpetuating the so-called Habsburg myth of supranational unity.18 The general conscription meant that Austro-Hungarian citizens of diverse ethno-linguistic backgrounds – Germans, Magyars, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Italians, Slovenes, Ruthenians, Romanians, and Bosnians (after 1878) – and diverse religious backgrounds were required to serve in a single military in service of a single monarch, Franz Joseph I (1830–1916).19 Many revered the emperor – or king, in Hungary – and proudly wore the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian military. Numerous photographs survive in archive and library collections, as well as private family collections, that depict men standing proudly in their pressed uniforms, not only during times of war but also peace. One such example, taken at the studio of Josef Kunzfeld of Brünn (Brno), depicts two soldiers – one appearing as an officer of the infantry, and the other of a lesser rank (Figure 30.2). The historic conventions of portrait photography aside, the sitters’ stiff postures and serious expressions emulate the perceived sense of decorum, discipline, and loyalty to the fatherland the military man was thought to embody.20 17

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Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 29–31. Oscar Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (1929; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 141. On post-Habsburg nostalgia for Franz Joseph I, see ch. 4. ‘The Empire Epitomized: Franz Joseph’, in Adam Koż uchowski, The Afterlife of AustriaHungary: Image of the Habsburg Monarchy in Interwar Europe (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 149–65. Matthews David, ‘Decorated Men’, 7.

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Figure 30.2 Portrait of young men from unidentified family album by J. Kunzfeld, Brünn, undated. Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem.

Donning a uniform could imbue a wearer with the ideals those particular garments were thought to represent. But not all men, let alone women, were able to join the armed forces. One way in which individuals could participate in the pantomime of national pride was through consuming civilian dress influenced by military uniforms. Just as in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when military attire influenced wider fashions in terms of cut and finish, so too towards the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The Boer War (1899–1902), for example, brought khaki fabrics into mainstream, civilian fashions

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throughout the Anglo world. Shannon Brent asserts that unlike earlier examples of military-inspired fashions, the khaki-craze was facilitated by mass media and manufacturing techniques that made these new products more readily available to a wider consumer base.21 Over the first decade of the new century and especially with the advent of the First World War, civilian fashion was similarly influenced by military attire, such as the Burberry trench coat, originally designed as a waterproof light overcoat for trench warfare, but eventually embraced as a staple of British masculine sartoriality.22 The Burberry trench coat proved popular not only among servicemen but also civilians, and spread from Britain to other parts of the Anglo world and continental Europe. In Vienna, a centre of Anglophilia at the turn of the twentieth century, numerous general and speciality periodicals advertised and extolled the virtues of Burberry coats – although unsurprisingly, they were scarce during the First World War when Austria found itself at war with Britain.23

foreign influences and national dress War and military attire were by no means the sole influencing factors of ‘national’ fashion. Certainly, in times of relative peace, other forms of what Alexander Maxwell refers to as ‘sartorial nationalism’ exerted an influence on public clothing trends.24 In political contexts with diverse populations, like the Habsburg Empire, diversity was embraced to perpetuate imperial identity 21

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Shannon Brent, ‘ReFashioning Men: Fashion, Masculinity, and the Cultivation of the Male Consumer in Britain’, Victorian Studies, 46/4 (2004), 605–6. Alice Gurr, ‘The Trench Coat: Fashioning British Gender Identities in War and Peace, 1851–1930’, Journal of Dress History, 3/4 (2019), 5–33. In the early years of the twentieth century, the Viennese court purveyor Jakob Rothberger held the Austrian rights of distribution for Burberry (‘Notiz: Wasserdicht ohne Kautschuk’, Illustrirte Rundschau, 13/19 (1 July 1902), 300) and regularly advertised waterproof Burberry coats in various Viennese periodicals of differing political leanings including Die Zeit, Die Neue Freie Presse, Wiener Zeitung, Neuigkeits-Welt-Blatt, Das Vaterland, Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung, Dillingers Reiseführer, Arbeiter Zeitung, Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, the Prague-based Prager Tagblatt, and the satirical Die Bombe and Figaro. Maxwell, Patriots against Fashion.

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and hegemony. The façade of Austrian supranational unity took on additional importance and urgency in the period after the 1848–9 revolutions. After the defeat of Hungarian nationalists and the exile of their leaders, and the loss of Habsburg territories in the Second Italian War of Independence (1859), the young emperor Franz Joseph I and other members of state were eager to foster an image of Habsburg multinational (or multi-ethnic) brotherhood. In the early 1860s, Vienna saw the publication of the short-lived Wiener Moden Zeitung (Vienna Fashion Newspaper) (1862–3) published by the Wiener Moden-Verein (Viennese Fashion Syndicate). The journal fashioned itself as the ‘Organ der Universal- Moden für Damen und Herren’ (organ of universal women’s and men’s fashion) – which it used as its subtitle – and sought to raise awareness among its readers of Vienna’s important role, or at least desired role, as a leader in world fashion. Over its two-year existence the format of the journal remained the same: an editorial on the topic of fashionable dress, industry news, theatre reviews, descriptions of ‘new’ clothing styles, followed by a double-spread fashion plate and a number of patterns and drafting instructions for featured garments. Like other fashion journals of the period, the Wiener Moden Zeitung had a strong focus on the industry and above all targeted industry personnel. The tone of the journal was markedly patriotic. In its trial issue, Friedrich Korbel, couturier and member of the Wiener Moden-Verein, declared the journal’s main objective was to raise the esteem of ‘the German, or better, the Austrian fashion’,25 not through a rejection of foreign influences, but rather using external influences to benefit local industry and raise its international profile.26 Korbel acknowledged the esteem of French and English fashions, but countered that there was nothing 25

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Friedrich Korbel, ‘Die Aufgabe des Wiener Moden-Vereins’, Wiener Moden Zeitung, 1 January 1862, 3. That Korbel first writes ‘German’ before correcting himself and referring to ‘Austrian fashion’ is pertinent in relation to the wider questions surrounding a supranational ‘Austrian’ identity in the context of German cultural and political hegemony over the other ‘nations’ of Austria. The editor’s response to letters (‘Correspondenz der Redaktion’) – a regular component of the journal – indicated that the magazine enjoyed a wider readership beyond Vienna, with letters sent in from throughout Austria and from locations as far afield as France, Prussia, and the Romanian United Principalities.

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about these styles that were particularly French or English and instead referred to the fashion of ‘civilization’.27 Korbel’s opening appeal to the journal’s readers set the tone for future issues, in which the editors regularly extolled the virtues of Austrian industry and its worthiness as a competitor in the international (read ‘European’) fashion market. At times, editors chastised Viennese retailers and manufacturers for advertising their wares as ‘French’ or ‘English’ when they should have been promoting local industry.28 Simultaneously, the (perceived) connections between Vienna, Paris, and London were celebrated, and news from France and England – and to a lesser extent other parts of the world – was dutifully reported. During its first year, the journal regularly recounted the success of Austria at the 1862 International Exhibition in London.29 The fashion plates included within every issue depicted styles no different to those worn in other parts of Europe. As can be expected, women’s clothing offered a greater variety in terms of silhouettes, outerwear, and head-coverings. As the menswear depicted was usually covered by a dark overcoat of some kind, and the figures illustrated were wearing top hats, the distinctiveness of men’s dress was expressed through the written garment descriptions (Figure 30.3). Where the depictions of men’s attire did differ was in the regular inclusion of ‘national costume’ (Nationaltrachten) as a means of emphasizing the ‘Austrianness’ of local fashions, in contrast to the sober respectability of the otherwise (English) attire. Although the German character of Austria was emphasized in early issues, it was more common to see male Nationaltrachten of the Polish and Hungarian varieties than the typical alpine Tyrolean or Styrian styles as a form of leisure attire: fulled-wool jackets, knee-breeches, and the ubiquitous alpine hat, attire made popular by Franz Joseph I. In fact, in the February 1862 issue the fashion plate depicted a ball scene populated by men and women in 27

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Korbel, ‘Die Aufgabe des Wiener Moden-Vereins’. Naturally, in referring to ‘civilization’ it is clear that Korbel refers to the West. C. Karl, ‘Die Brillanten-Gründe Wiens’, Wiener Moden Zeitung, 1/1 (1862), 2. ‘Austria’ in the wider sense, including the non-German crownlands. ‘NotizBlätter’, Wiener Moden Zeitung, 1/5 (1862), 3.

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Figure 30.3 Fashion plate by V. Katzler, published in Wiener Moden Zeitung, 2/5 (1863). ANNO: Historische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

national dress of Austria’s ‘Hauptnationalitäten’: Croats, Bohemians (Czechs), Germans, Hungarians, Poles, and Serbs.30 It is noteworthy that the Nationaltrachten in question are not folk styles per se – with the exception of the Serb depicted somewhat faded in the background. Instead, the men are depicted in elaborate gala uniforms and stylized headgear and the women in ball gowns embellished with folk and military motifs (Figure 30.4). Perhaps there was a sense of femininity in the donning of folk costume or national dress and the performance of ‘national’ identities in contrast to the aggressive performance of masculinity through military garb. After all, the author refers to the women as ‘reizende Blume des Landes’ (the country’s charming/graceful/fetching flower, i.e. national flower) in an overt reference to perceived female

30

‘National-Trachten’, Wiener Moden Zeitung, 1/2 (February 1862), 3. The group was by no means exhaustive. ‘Nationalities’ absent from this scene are Slovaks, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Italians, and Romanians. Nor does the journal take into account the many regional varieties of different ‘national dress’.

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Figure 30.4 Fashion plate by V. Katzler, published in Wiener Moden Zeitung, 1/2 (1862). ANNO: Historische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

passivity.31 The dress of the German couple, in contrast to their ethnic counterparts, is devoid of military or folk motifs: the woman in a white gown with floral trimmings and a hairstyle reminiscent of that of Elisabeth of Austria (1837–98), and the man in Frack (white tie and tails). That the illustrator has opted not to include ‘German’ Nationaltracht in this case, whereas alpine Trachten appear in other issues of the publication, is curious,32

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A comment on the nation’s ‘female’ soul that requires domination by the (masculine) military. ‘National-Trachten’. As a parallel, Colleen McQuillin refers to a ball celebrating Alexander II’s coronation as tsar of Russia in 1856, at which female attendees dressed in traditional Russian dresses and tiaras while men wore gala uniforms. Colleen McQuillen, The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 68. Wiener Moden Zeitung, 1 January 1862; Wiener Moden Zeitung, 1/8 (1962); Wiener Moden Zeitung, 1/9 (1862).

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and is perhaps a comment on the German’s role as ‘civilizer’ of Austria’s disparate national groups.33 During the latter half of the nineteenth century, folk- or national costume possessed a special status in the world of Austrian – after 1867, Austro-Hungarian – fashion, whereby like military uniforms and evening wear it was worn for ceremonial purposes. This was, in part, fostered by the emperor Franz Joseph I’s support of ethnolinguistic minorities and use of Austria-Hungary’s varying folk costumes within the Habsburg court. However, Franz Joseph’s embrace of sartorial diversity was strategic. During the 1848–9 revolution and in its aftermath, Hungarian ‘national costume’ – a combination of díszmagyar (gala dress) worn by the Magyar elite and peasant styles – became a symbol of anti-Habsburg resistance.34 Upon his first official visit to the twin cities Buda and Pest as emperor in 1852, Franz Joseph was met by crowds dressed in Magyar costume, a sartorial protest against his imperial presence.35 However, returning five years later, Franz Joseph and Elisabeth toured in the very styles their opponents had worn in 1852 as protest, ‘a gesture of reconciliation’ that earned them the respect of the locals.36 The imperial couple did not treat this as a one-off incident, but continued to fashion themselves as legitimate rulers of Hungary, becoming fluent in the Hungarian language and appearing at official events in Magyar styles.37 While Franz Joseph often appeared in the traditional uniform of the Hussar, with its overt military associations, Elisabeth incorporated motifs and elements of Hungarian ‘folk’ dress into her attire. The dress she wore for her coronation as queen of Hungary in 1867 was designed by Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895) and referenced both Hungarian styles 33

34

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Writing in 1869, the politician Adolf Fischhof characterized Germans as the ‘core’ and most prominent (politically, culturally, and economically) of Austria’s nations. See Adolf Fischhof, Oesterreich und die Bürgschaften seines Bestandes (1869; repr., Vienna: Josef Klemm, 1870). Katalin Medvedev, ‘Hungary: Urban Dress up to 1948’, in Djurdja Bartlett and Pamela Smith (eds.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 9: East Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 222–9. Maxwell, Patriots against Fashion, 201. 36 Ibid. Christopher M. VanDemark, ‘Empress Elisabeth (“Sisi”) of Austria and Patriotic Fashionism’, Hungarian Cultural Studies, 9 (2016), 5–6.

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and French fashions.38 Women, unlike men, were permitted a greater opportunity to express themselves through clothing. So, while Franz Joseph, as leader of the armed forces, wore military tunics, although resplendent with frogging and braids, with associations of virile albeit disciplined masculinity, Elisabeth’s incorporation of folk motifs and styles allowed her to fashion herself as the very heart and soul of the Hungarian nation in a more sartorially obvious manner. Furthermore, by wearing a dress designed by a famous British-born, Parisian couturier, the Bavarian-born Elisabeth was able to bring Hungary onto the stage of fashion for official events and celebrations. Art historian Rebecca Houze refers to the imperial and royal family’s promotion and consumption of national costumes as ‘imperial masquerade’, an attempt to foster a sense of paternal unity among the ethno-linguistically disparate and at times conflict-ridden population of Austria-Hungary.39 The empire’s cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity was exploited for international purposes throughout the second half of the century at exhibitions (both locally and abroad) and official pageants and festivals in 1873, 1879, 1891, 1898, and 1908.40 The taste for Nationaltrachten and their use in official contexts lasted to the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, at the end of the First World War. This imperial exploitation of national costume serves as a curious counterpart to the highly politicized and nationalistic meanings (that is, anti-Habsburg and at times xenophobic) associated with the same attire at different periods.

trachtenmoden In Central and Eastern Europe, the politicization of national or ethnic costume was a common method for subjugated peoples to rebel sartorially against their Austrian or Russian overlords.41 Like the modern tailored suit, with its complex and varied symbolic 38

39 41

Rebecca Houze, Textiles, Fashion, and Design Reform in Austria-Hungary before the First World War: Principles of Dress (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 253. See Ch. 7, ‘Imperial Masquerade’, in ibid., 247–85. 40 Ibid., 269. Bartlett and Smith (eds.), Berg Encyclopedia.

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meanings,42 ethnic dress was similarly imbued. However, unlike the democratization offered by the suit as a standard uniform of masculine respectability, the symbolic uniformity of ethnic dress afforded its wearers the ability to exclude others who did not meet the criteria of ethnic or national homogeneity. In other contexts, ethnic or national dress was not solely used as a tool for political expression. Among those nations not subjected to the hegemony of another, such as Sweden, folk dress developed a similarly ceremonial albeit apolitical character. Folklorist Pravina Shukla asserts that the development of a Swedish national costume was the direct result of the fashion system, whereby older, often provincial, attire became ‘divorced from their original quotidian context’ and exploited by official institutions in the development of a canonized and homogenized national culture, and thus excluded individuals who do not conform to such models of ‘Swedish’ nationality, such as foreigners or the Indigenous Sámi of northern Scandinavia.43 Beyond their symbolic associations and use in ceremonial contexts, in some cases national dress came to influence fashion over the course of the nineteenth century. In ‘southern’ German environs (including parts of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland) sartorial fashions adapted from earlier peasant dress – referred to as Trachtenmoden, as distinct from authentic Trachten44 – were commonly adopted by urban visitors to the country or in the context of costume balls. Volkstrachten – as they were sometimes referred to in an attempt to emphasize the völkisch (folkish, folksy) 42

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See Christopher Breward, The Suit: Form, Function and Style (London: Reaktion Books, 2016); Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1660–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain, 1880–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Pravina Shukla, ‘Swedish Folk Dress’, in Lise Skov (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 8: West Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2010). For a more in-depth exploration of specific garment types and their symbolic meanings in the contemporary era, see Pravina Shukla, ‘Heritage: Folk Costume in Sweden’, in Costume: Performing Identities through Dress (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 71–115. See also Desiree Koslin, ‘Sámi’, in Skov (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia, 345–9. See Gerda Buxbaum, Mode aus Wien, 1815–1938 (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1986), 329.

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or nationalistic, exclusionary aspect of the costume – developed deep-seated significance as sartorial symbols underscoring cultural/ethnic/national homogeneity.45 Tracht as a form of fashionable dress is the result in part of members of the imperial and royal family adopting such attire outside of their original contexts. In the Austrian context, Archduke Johann (1782–1859) adopted ‘alpine’ styles such as Lederhosen (leather breeches), Steierrock (a fulled-wool jacket in the Styrian style), and the grey and green uniform of alpine brigades as a form of dress outside the Habsburg court.46 Later, his greatnephew, Franz Joseph I donned equally völkisch attire when on hunting expeditions and in other rural and informal settings. A photographic portrait presents the young Kaiser and his son, Crown Prince Rudolf (1858–1889), sitting stiffly on a log before a view of the Dachstein and Gosausee in the Salzkammergut region (Figure 30.5). Both Franz Joseph and Rudolf wear what would become typical Trachtenjanker (traditional alpine jackets) – probably grey in colour with the lapels, collar, and cuffs in green47 – Lederhosen, hobnailed boots and long woollen socks or possibly Wadenstutzen (knitted stockings worn over the calves). The Kaiser wears a type of Tirolerhut with wide band decorated with Gamsbart (chamois fur brush) and what appears to be a sprig of flowers. To avoid any confusion about the context of this portrait, a Wanderung (hiking expedition) and Jagd (hunt), the sitters are in possession of wooden canes and Franz Joseph holds a rifle across his lap. During the latter part of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth, advertisements for Trachtenmoden appeared throughout Austro-Hungarian newspapers and magazines. Sometimes, the advertisements appeared in periodicals dedicated to folk culture such as Der Gebirgsfreund (1890–1941). In this periodical, retailers advertised accoutrements to ‘hunters’ and 45

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Petr Bogatyrev, The Functions of Folk Costume in Moravian Slovakia, trans. Richard G. Crum (1937; repr., The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 54–5; Rudolf von Tavel, ‘Was ist uns die Volkstracht?’, Heimatschutz, 22/6 (1927), 81–91. Von Tavel, ‘Was ist uns die Volkstracht?’ The photograph is sepia-toned and therefore the actual colours of the garments in question are unknown; however, the grey/green combination was common for such items of clothing.

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Figure 30.5 Portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph I and Crown Prince Rudolf by Victor Angerer, c. 1865. ÖNB / Wiener Bildarchiv Pf 19000 E 197a. © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

‘tourists’ – such as F. Turczynski, Karl Schönbauer, Richard Plankl, and Mizzi Langer of Vienna. Outerwear in Loden cloth (fulled wool), alpine hats, breeches, knitwear, boots and hiking gear such as canes, rucksacks, and ice-picks were common. Although directed at both men and women, the images accompanying such advertisements typically featured young robust (or sometimes portly middle-aged) and hirsute men posed in alpine settings decked out in the firm’s wares (Figure 30.6). Such advertisements correspond to photographs of urban male visitors to the provinces, dressed in the same attire.

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Figure 30.6 Advertisement for F. Turczynski (Vienna), published in Der Gebirgsfreund, 8/12 (1897). ANNO: Historische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

Fashionable dress inspired by folk styles was by no means exclusive to the Austrian (or German) context. Elsewhere, folk styles were combined with modern fashions. Just like Elisabeth’s choice of a Magyar-inspired dress for her and Franz Joseph’s coronation as queen and king of Hungary in 1867 that served to honour local sartorial traditions, at the end of the century, folk motifs were combined with ‘foreign’ styles as a means to emphasize national pride and modernity. In Zagreb, for example, the industrialist Salamon Berger (1858–1934) combined Croatian folk motifs with emerging Art Nouveau fashions, winning acclaim not only at home but abroad in Paris.48 Although Zagreb developed during the second half of the century as the centre of Croatian and to an extent South-Slav nationalism, it still found itself very much under the influence of Budapest and Vienna,49 and was by no means prominent on the wider European 48

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Katarina Nina Simonč ič , ‘Women’s Fashion in Zagreb, Croatia, 1900–1918’, The Journal of Dress History, 3/1 (2019), 111. Dragan Damjanović , ‘In the Shadow of Budapest (and Vienna): Architecture and Urban Development of Zagreb in the Late Nineteenth and Early

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stage. Nevertheless, despite its marginality, the success of Croatian folk-style fashions in Paris was by no means unusual. Fin de siècle French and by extension wider European dress fashion and other forms of visual culture embraced ‘oriental’ styles (East and Southeast European, Ottoman, and East Asian).50 While consuming ‘foreign’ or ‘Eastern’ styles was fashionable in Paris and other cities of Western Europe, in their original contexts they were imbued with additional meanings, such as national determination, rejecting ‘foreign’ or ‘modern’ intrusions, or fashioning a particular national myth in the context of external xenophobia.51

modern fashion for modern nations The sartorial connections with and similarities in style between smaller cities like Zagreb and Paris, Europe’s fashion capital, can be understood as being part of a wider network of European fashion and the leading roles of Paris and London in women’s fashion and men’s tailoring, respectively. Scholars have addressed the leading influences of these two cities within the wider arena of European fashion.52 However, in the context of multi-ethnic empires and emerging nation-states over the course of the nineteenth century, consuming fashions from Paris and London was not simply a manner of being ‘well-dressed’. Dressing in styles from those cities was a way for individuals (and groups) to identify with the ideals of modern nation-states during a century of political instability and rising national sentiment. Politicians, thinkers, and artists throughout Europe recognized the significance of clothing and material culture in general in fostering political ideals and national sentiment. As Dorota Heneghan writes in the context of

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Twentieth Centuries’, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung / Journal of East Central European Studies, 7/4 (2018), 522–51. Simonč ič , ‘Women’s Fashion in Zagreb’, 109. J. Rusch, ‘Fremde Einflüsse und deren Wirkung auf die Heimatbaukunst: mit besonderer Bezugnahme a. d. Land Vorarlberg’, Vorarlberger LandesZeitung, 11 April 1908, 1–2. See for example Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin, and Caroline Cox (eds.), The Englishness of English Dress (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 1988); Valerie Steele (ed.), Paris, Capital of Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).

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nineteenth-century Spain, ‘As time moved on, fashion became more and more entrenched in the process of modernization and its key components: consumerism, mass culture, and urban spectacle.’53 In short, French- and English-style clothes were associated with modernization. For nations – both those struggling for self-determination and those supranational entities struggling for hegemony among their diverse subjects – clothing could be used for the purposes of modernization or even control. In 1860, only a year after Austria’s defeat and loss of territory in the Second Italian War of Independence, the Viennese feuilletonist Friedrich Uhl (1825–1906) penned an article under the vague title ‘Die Mode’ (Fashion) for the Viennese daily, Die Presse. In this long and somewhat rambling feuilleton, Uhl mused about the meaning of fashion, its distinction from clothing more generally, and what makes some countries more fashionable than others. In line with prevalent views about the state of European fashion and its centres, Uhl highlighted France and England as capitals of sartorial style; however, he made clear references to the gendered binary these fashion capitals represented. Just as France today still reigns so absolutely in the empire of women’s fashion, so too does England reign in men’s dress and accessories. One can say that France rules over the world’s women, and England its men, just as the woman dominates in France and the man in England. If in France it is primarily a question of taste, England concerns itself above all with convenience and comfort. What elegant man today dresses in any way other than English?54

Uhl’s ideas about the political and social hegemony of women within French society of 1860 are misguided. However, the gendered binary employed is important, not simply as part of a wider context of prevalent gender roles and expectations within European societies during the nineteenth century, but in the way

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Dorota Heneghan, Striking Their Modern Pose: Fashion, Gender, and Modernity in Galdós, Pardo Bazán, and Picón (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015), 9. Translation my own. Friedrich Uhl, ‘Die Mode’, Die Presse, 6 May 1860, 2.

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it has been used to contrast France and England, fashion and tailoring, ‘taste’ and ‘comfort’. The emphasis on Paris and London’s respective authorities in ‘fashion’ and ‘tailoring’ was not unique. Across Europe, urban populations not only dressed in supposedly French and English clothing but, so too, perpetuated the idea that they were supreme over clothing of other manufacture or design. Over the course of the nineteenth century, fashion plates, pattern books, and lifestyle journals from across the continent made constant reference to Paris and London as the cornerstones of sartorial elegance. Material printed across the continent reported on the latest trends from the two fashion capitals, made use of French- and Englishlanguage clothing terminology, and depicted figures dressed in French and English styles. Clothing boutiques and warehouses in Zagreb, Warsaw, and Stockholm guaranteed the latest styles from London and Paris (Figure 30.7). In Sweden, the modernization of society through parliamentary reform in 1866 similarly made use of modern fashions from France and Britain. This was influenced in a large way by the industrialization and urbanization of Sweden’s previously largely rural population.55 A modern population required modern dress suited to the context of urban life. While Swedish society had been subject to sartorial modernization with Gustav III’s (1746–1792) introduction of a national uniform in 1778 that regulated colour, cut, fabric, and trimmings,56 the sartorial modernization of the mid-nineteenth century happened more organically. As in other parts of Europe, the Swedish population was exposed to French and English fashions through the business acumen of designers and retailers, and evolving dress patterns of the monarchy.57 Although Swedish folk dress remained in use for ceremonial purposes, especially in the performance of Swedish national identity (Figure 30.8),58 urban populations, like their counterparts in other parts of Scandinavia,

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On Sweden’s industrialization, see Lars Magnusson, An Economic History of Sweden (London: Routledge, 2000). Joanna Marschner, ‘Court Dress’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), The Berg Companion to Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 182–4. Ulla Brück, ‘Sweden’, in Skov (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia, 323–9. 58 Ibid.

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Figure 30.7 Advertisement for M. Arnstein’s Zagreb boutique Englezki Magazin, published in Agramer Zeitung, 4 April 1895. ANNO: Historische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Figure 30.8 Portrait of a girl dressed in the costume of Herrestad or Järrestad in Skåne County by Gösta Florman, c. 1870–1900. Nordiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, NMA.0040001.

dressed by and large in modern dress following the lead of Paris and London.59

fashion and forced modernization In some cases, modern clothing was used as a form of control, a function of forced modernization and cultural and/or political 59

See Mikkel Venborg Pedersen, Den Perfekte Gentleman: mænd, stil og idealer i verden af I går (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2018); Leif Runefelt, ‘The Corset and the Mirror: Fashion and Domesticity in Swedish Advertisements and Fashion Magazines, 1870–1914’, History of Retailing and Consumption, 5/2 (2019), 169–93.

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hegemony. Prior to the nineteenth century, there had been numerous attempts to mandate sartorial modernization or uniformity: Russia 1700, Sweden 1778, France 1794, and various German cities, kingdoms, and principalities throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.60 In Russia, Peter the Great (1672– 1725) had successfully enacted sartorial modernization from 1700, abandoning traditional Russian dress in favour of that of countries further west in an attempt to orient Russia and Russian culture towards Europe.61 Russian use of modern styles as a form of control continued during the nineteenth century. This was in part due to the diversity of the Russian population, especially as a result of the three partitions of Poland by Russia, Austria, and Prussia (1772, 1793, 1795), through which Russia absorbed a linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse people along with its newly acquired territory.62 In the case of the Kingdom of Poland (also known as Congress Poland), which Russia acquired from Prussia after the Congress of Vienna, Russia absorbed large Polish and Jewish populations, both of whom were subject to clothing restrictions over the course of the century. By the 1840s, despite restrictions on Jewish residency in Warsaw, the former Polish capital was home to a growing Jewish community that Russia felt needed to be made useful to the state, despite not granting them equality. As part of a wider programme of modernization and Russification, Tsar Nicholas I (1796–1855) announced a ban on ‘Jewish’ dress in Warsaw, reminiscent of Peter the Great’s sartorial modernization the previous century. Under the clothing ban, Warsaw’s Jews would be required to abandon their traditional attire in favour of Russian or ‘Western’ styles.63 The ban came in the wake of those introduced in other 60

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See Justus Möser, ‘“The Benefits of a National Uniform, Declaimed by a Citizen” from Patriotic Fantasies (1775)’, in Daniel Leonhard Purdy (ed.), The Rise of Fashion: A Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 87–92; Maxwell, Patriots against Fashion, 80–95. Maxwell, Patriots against Fashion, 60–2. See Dorota Praszałowicz, ‘Poland’, in Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen, and Jochen Oltmer (eds.), The Encylopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe: From the 17th Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 143–4. Glenn Dynner, ‘The Garment of Torah: Clothing Decrees and the Warsaw Career of the First Gerer Rebbe’, in Glenn Dynner and François Guesnet

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parts of the Russian Pale of Settlement earlier in the century (1804 and 1835), as well as sartorial-based incentives for residential freedom whereby wealthy Warsaw Jews were offered exemption from residential restrictions outside of the city’s Jewish quarter in return for modernizing their appearances.64 The Jewish clothing bans can be seen not simply as another example of anti-Jewish discrimination in its long history on the continent, but also as a means of bolstering Russian political and cultural hegemony amidst a largely non-Russian colonized population. Like Prussia and Austria, Russia was faced with armed uprisings of Polish patriots (including acculturating Jews) throughout the nineteenth century, all of which resulted in Polish defeat.65 After the partitions of Poland, traditional ‘Polish’ dress gradually disappeared to be replaced with English (among men) and French (among women) attire.66 In all likelihood, the transition from traditional costumes to modern ‘European’ fashion was derived from pre-partition ‘Polish occidentalism’ that looked towards ideas such as the Enlightenment and republicanism, but was similarly influenced by the cultures and agendas of the new rulers.67 In the Austrian zone of partition, Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790) set out to reinvent ‘The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria’ as a legitimate hereditary Habsburg entity.68 This reinvention entailed an ‘enlightening’ project whereby the dismantled Polish noble hegemony – as well as the large Ruthenian and Jewish populations – was recast as backwards, in need of serious reform.69

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(eds.), Warsaw, Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Profesor Anthony Polonsky (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 104–5. Ibid., 95, 98–9. For a historical overview, see Stanislaus A. Blejwas, ‘New Political Directions: A Transition toward Popular Participation in Politics, 1863– 90’, in M. B. B. Biskupski, James S. Pula, and Piotr J. Wróbel (eds.), The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). Anna Straszewska, ‘Poland: Urban Dress up to 1900’, in Bartlett and Smith (eds.), Berg Encyclopedia, 222–9. Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999), 12–13. Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 17. Ibid., 20–3.

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Thus, with adoption of ‘Western’ styles as a result of prepartition Polish attitudes to the Enlightenment, the Russian bans on traditional Polish clothing after the failed November Uprising (1830–1)70 and Jewish clothing during the early and mid-nineteenth century, Poland’s urban populations became more sartorially cohesive with others in Europe. Nevertheless, with the rising patriotic sentiment of the mid-nineteenth century, culminating in the failed January Uprising (January 1863–June 1864), folk and ethnic dress and motifs would come to the fore.71 While some participants of the January Uprising donned the czamara (a kind of frock coat with high collar, defined waist, and frogging closure) and konfederatka (high, four-cornered cap) (Figure 30.9) as a sign of their political and national sympathies, elements of Polish traditional dress would also influence mainstream fashion.72 After 1867, Poles in Habsburg Galicia were awarded far greater autonomy to cultivate Polish national culture and expression than their counterparts under Russian and Prussian hegemony. In fact, in the wake of the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, which created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary and awarded Magyars their own state and political power, no other ethno-linguistic group was granted as much cultural and administrative autonomy as the Poles of Galicia.73 As with the díszmagyar (Hungarian gala dress) in Hungary, Polish traditional dress in Galicia was mainly reserved for ceremonial use, while urban populations dressed in standard European fashions.74 Polish-language fashion and lifestyle periodicals and catalogues, whether published in the Russian or Austrian empires, depicted fashions typical of the rest of Europe. The Warsaw-based Magazyn Mód (Fashion Magazine) (1860–1) and its successor Tygodnik Mód (Weekly Fashion) (1862–90) ran full-page 70

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Adam Jasienski, ‘A Savage Magnificence: Ottomanizing Fashion and the Politics of Display in Early Modern East-Central Europe’, Muqarnas, 31/1 (2014), 197. Anita Broda, ‘Poland: Ethnic Dress’, in Barlett and Smith (eds.), Berg Encyclopedia, 216–21. Straszewska, ‘Poland’. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 349–50. See also Wolff, The Idea of Galicia, esp. ch. 5, ‘After the Revolution: The Rise of Czas and the Advent of Franz Joseph’, 188–230. Straszewska, ‘Poland’.

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Figure 30.9 Portrait of unknown man in czamara and konfederatka cap by Karol Beyer, Warsaw, c. 1863. National Library, Warsaw, Poland.

colour plates and smaller images depicting elegant women and men in garments typical of the times. The only visual reference to Polish culture was the occasional folk motifs in embroidery and lace pattern (Figures 30.10 and 30.11).

artistic dress and national sentiment The taste for folk or ethnic motifs in clothing gained popularity beyond members of the particular national or cultural communities from which they were derived. Artists, designers, and social

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Figure 30.10 Embroidery and lace examples on shawls and blouses depicted in Magazyn Mód, November 1861. National Library, Warsaw, Poland.

critics looked towards folk aesthetics, both their own and those of other communities, to modernize European fashions – both locally and abroad. During the fin de siècle, European societies saw the advent of dress reforms. While they might be viewed in the context

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Figure 30.11 Fashion plate from Tygodnik Mód, no. 37, 10 September 1887. National Library, Warsaw, Poland.

of wider emerging art forms and modernist movements, many were intricately woven into individual political and national contexts, serving as a way to bolster nationalism and perpetuate colonial narratives.75 For example, various European ‘nations’ (including those under the dominion of others) developed their own form of 75

Richard Warren, Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 139.

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‘Art Nouveau’. In Vienna, for example, the Secessionist movement led by Gustav Klimt and Koloman Moser would become involved in the development and popularization of the Reformkleid (reform dress). Vienna’s Reformkleid grew out of debates about the reform of women’s dress in North America and Europe, in which medical practitioners and social critics rejected conventional women’s fashion as unhealthy and unhygienic, especially tight lacing.76 Dress reformers rejected clothing and accessories that restricted the body and deformed its natural shape, such as corsets, other tight clothing, and certain types of shoes, and instead looked towards the loose and layered attire of ‘oriental’ or ‘folk’ cultures.77 Reform dresses were designed by Secessionist artists Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge around 1905, and from 1910 the dresses and fabric ranges of the Wiener Werkstätte (with which Klimt, Flöge, and many other Secessionist artists and designers were involved) incorporated many ‘orientalist’ and folk motifs (Figure 30.12).78 In nationalistic terms, local commentators presented the new fashions as Vienna’s answer to Paris’ reigning influence.79 And thus, the Viennese reform dresses can be seen as following in the nineteenth-century tradition of employing fashionable dress as a tool for modernization.80 Rather than incorporating overtly ‘German’ folk aesthetics, the use of non-German folk motifs81 reveals a continuation of the domestic colonization of Austria-Hungary’s multi-ethnic population, in a similar manner to that promoted in the early 1860s by the Wiener Modern Zeitung. 76

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For example Ada S. Ballin, The Science of Dress in Theory and Practice (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1885); William Henry Flower, Fashion in Deformity: As Illustrated in the Customs of Barbarous & Civilised Races (London: Macmillan, 1881). See also Kathleen M. Torrens, ‘Fashion as Argument: Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform’, Argumentation and Advocacy, 36 (1999), 77–87. Torrens, ‘Fashion as Argument’, 80–2; Houze, Textiles, 200. Angela Völker, Textiles of the Wiener Werkstätte, 1910–1932 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994). Houze, Textiles, 225. The architect Adolf Loos, a vehement opponent of the Secession, similarly argued for fashionable clothing’s role in societal modernization. However, by Loos’ account, fashionable dress was that which was modern and contextually appropriate, rather than novel. See Adolf Loos, ‘Herrenmode’, Neue Freie Presse, 22 May 1898, 16. Houze, Textiles, 220.

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Figure 30.12 Portrait of Secessionist painter Mileva Roller (1886–1949) in a Reformkleid by Atelier Madame d’Ora, Vienna, 1908. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

Further west, Belgian Art Nouveau exploited its colonies abroad for a similar purpose. By the time Vienna Secessionist designers were using their reform dresses as a kind of supranational pantomime in the context of celebrating the diversity of the Dual Monarchy, Austro-Hungarian hegemony was in the process of crumbling and would be fully dissolved by the end of the second decade of the new century. Belgium, however, under Leopold II was flexing its muscles in the Congo Free State, pillaging natural resources and murdering the local

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population.82 Deborah Silverman has demonstrated how Belgium showcased its colonial pomp both at home and in the Congo, exhibiting sculptures made of ivory and silver that sought to perpetuate Belgium’s colonial power and prestige.83 In addition to the use of colonized materials, imperial power was perpetuated through aesthetic design. Artist and designer Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) included stylized motifs associated with the Congo Free State – elephants, native plants, and even Congolese bodies – within his designs for interiors, furniture, objets d’arts, and clothing.84 Belgian Art Nouveau’s incorporation of such motifs served to justify not only imperial identity, but national identity in general. Unlike Austria, with its centurieslong dynastic imperial identity, at the fin de siècle Belgium was still a relatively young nation, only having gained its independence from the Netherlands in 1831. And like Austria, Belgium faced a similar ‘nationality problem’ with its diverse population of Dutch-speaking Flemish, French-speaking Walloons, and Germans.85 Imperialism and its material trappings were thus employed as a cultural glue for its disparate domestic populations. Shortly before van de Velde’s Congo-inspired designs, Belgium had hosted the 1894 international exhibition in Antwerp (Exposition Internationale d’Anvers) at which numerous nations participated. The exhibition was lauded in the press as a worthy competitor to those held in Paris (1889) and Chicago (1893),86 and sought to showcase the best of Belgian industrial and creative outputs. Drawing attention to Belgium’s existence as a colonial 82

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Deborah L. Silverman, ‘Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I’, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 18/2 (2011), 142. Ibid., 144–52. Deborah L. Silverman, ‘Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgium Modernism, Part II’, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 19/2 (2012), 175–95. See Herman Van Goethem, ‘The First Cracks in the Façade of National Unity’, in Belgium and the Monarchy: From National Independence to National Disintegration, trans. Ian Connerty (Brussels: UPA, 2011), 59–84. Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt, ‘Re-enacting a Scrutinised Past at the Antwerp World Exhibition of 1894’, Forum Modernes Theater, 26/1 (2011), 21.

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power, the exhibition included sculptures made of plundered ivory,87 and presented Congolese bodies through the exhibition of 144 individuals transported to Belgium for the event, in the macabre fashion of human zoos that had become popular across Europe and North America during the second half of the nineteenth century.88 From the perspective of fashion, the spectacle of Belgium’s colonial exhibits could only go so far in perpetuating a colonialist identity. It was through the consumption of products, especially dress, that individuals could truly embody Belgium’s colonial identity. Van de Velde gowns might be compared to masks. Colleen McQuillen describes the agency of masks in presenting the wearer’s desired self, ‘a consistent public image, which is suggestive of predictability and trustworthiness; by demonstrating such qualities, a political actor can establish and maintain legitimate power’.89 In donning gowns that referenced elephants through the silhouette and surface appliqué, or else those that were festooned with motifs inspired by Congolese bodies (Figure 30.13), individuals could engage in a perverse performance of colonial pantomime, in which they embodied (figuratively and sartorially) the skins of natives – a more severe version of Houze’s imperial masquerade.

conclusion The questions of nations and empires continued to plague Europe into the new century. European colonial powers staved off rebellions and descended into wars abroad, while on the continent, colonized nations continued to rise up against their overlords, culminating in the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The persistence of nationalism and militarism continued to influence dress 87

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Debora L. Silverman, ‘“Modernité Sans Frontières”: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of the Avant-Garde in King Leopold’s Belgium, 1885–1910’, American Imago, 68/4 (2012), 748. Silverman, ‘Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: Part II’, 179. See also David Ciarlo, ‘Impressions of Others: Allegorical Clichés, Panoptic Arrays, and Popular Savagery’, in Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 65–107. McQuillen, The Modernist Masquerade, 63–4.

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Figure 30.13 Two women wearing tea gowns designed by Henry van de Velde, published in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 5/7 (April 1902). The elephantine silhouettes and motifs inspired by Congolese body ornamentations are visible on the hems, cuffs, and bodices. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Heidelberg.

fashions. Consumers were encouraged to buy local and shun the products of enemy states.90 Similarly, the war and greater 90

Heather Hess, ‘The Wiener Werkstätte and the Reform Impulse’, in Regina Lee Blaszczyk (ed.), Producing Fashions: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 126–9.

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professional opportunities for women that came with an absence of men influenced choices of material, colour, and cut of emerging styles.91 Parallel to the course of fashion, which as before followed the models of Paris and London, new varieties of artistic dress emerged and were propagated in their specific societies. In Italy, the Futurist movement, founded in 1909 by the poet Filippo Marinetti (1876– 1944), gloried war, militarism, and technological progress. Like earlier forms of European avant-garde, the Futurists engaged themselves in all facets of visual and creative arts, including dress.92 In line with wider Futurist attitudes, the painter Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) published his Manifesto futurista del vestito da uomo (Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Dress) in 1913, in which he spurned the conventions of respectable men’s dress in favour of ‘forceful MUSCULAR colours’ and ‘equally dynamic shapes’.93 In 1914 Balla revised his manifesto on Futurist men’s dress, taking a more aggressive and militaristic stance on the function of clothing, in line with the general wartime attitude.94 The Futurist views of fashion persisted through the war and into the 1920s and 1930s, embracing Mussolini’s fascism.95 However, despite efforts to shock the public with their occasional dynamic garb, Futurists did not attempt to manufacture their proposed fashions on a large scale, and Italian fashions continued to resemble those from Paris as well as Hollywood.96 Futurist designs for clothing can be understood along the lines of earlier attempts to introduce national uniforms for modern nations, born out of rising nationalism and conflict. Viewed within the chronology of the nineteenth century, the Futurists are just one example of the intersection between fashion and ideas of nation and empire. As this chapter demonstrates, this relationship, far 91 92

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Steele, Paris Fashion, 242–3. Patrizia Calefato, ‘Italian Futurism and Fashion’, trans. Sveva Scaramuzzi, in Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz (eds.), Fashion and Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 40. Cited in Maxwell, Patriots against Fashion, 218. Calefato, ‘Italian Futurism and Fashion’, 43. Emily Braun, ‘Futurist Manifesto: Three Manifestoes’, Art Journal, 54/1 (1995), 38. Maxwell, Patriots against Fashion, 222–3.

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from straightforward, concerned various types of dress and sartorial influences, as well as differing cultural and political contexts. Nor were specific contexts static: Austro-German Trachtenmoden, for example, possessed very different symbolic meanings before 1914, after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and again after Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938.97 So too in the Russian context, in which modern dress and fashion would come to embody new ideas after the 1917 October Revolution and triumph of Communism, and yet one that still related to the control of the Russian populace.98 This chapter has brought together otherwise discursive themes that are usually studied by separate discourses, such as ethnography, folklore, military history, and economic history. Approaching the subject matter from diverse perspectives affords the opportunity to discover new possibilities for the intersections of dress, fashion, and the emergence of ‘national’ culture. Nation and fashion, for example, have been examined from perspectives such as individual nations’ contribution to world fashion, or the consumer patterns within particular national contexts. However, fashion operates across many levels and varies from place to place. This chapter moves beyond the focus on either consumer patterns or dress as a national symbol and combines these approaches to examine the nuanced and reciprocal relationship between dress fashions and ideas of ‘nation’ in the context of modernity.

select bibliography Abler, Thomas S., Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress: European Empires and Exotic Uniforms (Oxford: Berg, 1999). Bartlett, Djurdja and Pamela Smith (eds.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 9: East Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

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Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, ‘Dirndl, Lederhose und Sommerfrischenidylle’, in Robert Kriechbaumer (ed.), Der Geschmack der Vergänglichkeit: Jüdische Sommerfrische in Salzburg (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2002), 329. See for example Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

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jonathan c. kaplan-wajselbaum Breward, Christopher, The Suit: Form, Function and Style (London: Reaktion Books, 2016). Buxbaum, Gerda, Mode aus Wien, 1815–1938 (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1986). Craik, Jennifer, Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression (Oxford: Berg, 2005). Entwistle, Joanne, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress & Modern Social Theory, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015). Houze, Rebecca, Textiles, Fashion, and Design Reform in AustriaHungary before the First World War: Principles of Dress (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Jasienski, Adam, ‘A Savage Magnificence: Ottomanizing Fashion and the Politics of Display in Early Modern East-Central Europe’, Muqarnas, 31/1 (2014), 173–205. Matthews David, Alison ‘Decorated Men: Fashioning the French Soldier, 1852–1914’, Fashion Theory, 7/1 (2003), 3–37. Maxwell, Alexander, Patriots against Fashion: Clothing and Nationalism in Europe’s Age of Revolutions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Purdy, Daniel Leonhard (ed.), The Rise of Fashion: A Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Silverman, Debora L., ‘“Modernité Sans Frontières”: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of the Avant-Garde in King Leopold’s Belgium, 1885–1910’, American Imago, 68/4 (2012), 707–97. Skov, Lise (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 8: West Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). Steele, Valerie (ed.), Paris, Capital of Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). Wallenberg, Louise and Andrea Kollnitz (eds)., Fashion and Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

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GENDER, NATION, FASHION, AND MODERNITIES IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC, 1900 TO THE PRESENT mina roces

introduction Filipino politicians are expected to participate in a fashion parade each year. Since about the end of the 1990s the annual President’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) in the Philippines has been preceded by an event in which the parliamentarians of both houses of the senate and congress and their partners or spouses are expected to walk down a red carpet attired in couture versions of the national dress especially tailor-made for this occasion. In 2014 the television channel ABS-CBNnews.com ran a People’s Fashion Choice contest on Facebook for the best-dressed attendee. The shortlist of ten contestants were all women composed of both politicians and those linked to male politicians as spouses, mothers, or sisters and therefore very influential, as in the Philippines power is held by kinship alliance groups.1 The winner of the contest was movie star Kris Aquino who wore a yellow and black Maria Clara-inspired national dress created by couturier Cary Santiago. She received 9,367 votes (Tootsie Angara, wife of Senator Sonny Angara was a distant second at 4,369 votes).2 Although the event showcased the country’s top couturiers, the selection of the winner was not 1

2

For an in-depth study on the topic of women, power, and kinship politics, see Mina Roces, Women, Power, and Kinship Politics: Female Power in Post-War Philippines (Westport: Praeger, 1998). ‘10 Best Dressed Women of SONA 2014’, ABS-CBN News, 29 July 2014, https://news.abs-cbn.com/lifestyle/07/29/14/10-best-dressed-women-sona-2014 (accessed 2 December 2019).

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solely about who wore the best dress or who was considered the country’s top couturier. The then President Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III was a bachelor and therefore had no First Lady. Instead, it was his sister Kris (the winning contestant) who was considered the most influential woman in the country because she was the female closest to the president. The competition spoke volumes about the gendering of power as women in the Philippines exercise power through their ties with men.3 This invented tradition, in which the country’s most powerful legislators participate in a fashion parade like international models and celebrities, is an example of the unique way in which politics, power, dress, gender, fashion, couture, and modernities are intertwined in the AsiaPacific (Figures 31.1 and 31.2). This chapter analyses the way dress and fashion have been integral to the Asia-Pacific’s engagement with modernities with a focus on the twentieth century to the present. Using case studies from the histories of a number of countries from the region, I argue that ruling elites had an ambivalent and contradictory engagement with the Westernization of dress, clothing practices, fashion, bodily performance and deportment as they participated in the project of modernizing their societies. In the age of empire, modernization was synonymous with Westernization and Western powers legitimized colonization with the discourse of ‘civilizing’ the natives that included adopting Western clothing styles and practice. Asian and Pacific states that wanted to ward off Western imperialism adopted Western clothing practices as visual markers that they were ‘civilized’ countries on equal status to the European and Atlantic powers. Thus, power-dressing in the age of empire was the adoption of Western dress beginning among elites. But, as anticolonial movements began to agitate for independence, nationalists advocated for the rejection of Western fashion and clothing styles as part of their strategies for overthrowing imperialism, launching revolutions, and fashioning new nations. Socialist countries like China, for example, labelled Western fashion as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘spiritually polluting’ banning their citizens from wearing what they considered to be ‘frivolous’ attire. Finally, 3

Roces, Women, Power, and Kinship Politics.

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Figure 31.1 Senator Grace Poe wearing an off-white formal terno with intricate embroidery by designer Roulette Esmilla at the red-carpet event prelude to SONA 2014. Photo by Niño Jesus Orbeta, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 29 July 2014, p. A13.

from the late twentieth century onwards, ruling elites aspired to produce their own indigenous versions of haute couture that could compete with the international luxury global brands in order to prove that their countries were ‘Third World No More’, to borrow from Brent Luvaas, and therefore deserved to move up in the global hierarchy of nations.4 As couture became the badge signifying ‘developed’ status, Asian and Pacific nations were keen to proclaim that 4

Brent Luvaas, ‘Third World No More: Rebranding Indonesian Streetwear’, Fashion Practice, 5/2 (2013), 203–27.

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Figure 31.2 Movie actress Heart Evangelista, wife of Senator Francis ‘Chiz’ Escudero wearing a ‘cage terno’ designed by Joey Samson with stud earrings and an Amina Aranez clutch walks the red carpet at the SONA in 2014. When she attended SONA 2014, she was still the senator’s girlfriend since they married in February 2015 after the senator obtained a church annulment for his first marriage. Photo by Alanah Torralba, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 29 July 2014, p. A13.

their indigenous fashion was on par with global (Western) couture and demonstrate that they were ultra-modern, cosmopolitan, and wealthy. These ambivalent engagements with Westernization as a marker of modernity had gendered implications. While men in Western dress began to epitomize modernity, anxieties arose about women’s adoption of Western apparel since the meanings associated with the stereotype of the ‘modern girl’ challenged societies’ notions

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that women should be bearers and wearers of national tradition. In contemporary times, the rise of Islamic fashion or ‘pious fashion’ to borrow from Elizabeth Bucar, underscores the way modern couture no matter how urban, cosmopolitan, or luxurious continues to have gendered valences.5 The Asia-Pacific is a rich site for the study of dress and fashion histories. Indigenous clothing and bodily practices, the adoption of hybrid Western dress in the colonization era, and the invention of national dress in the post-colonial era provide fertile examples for analysing the politics of dress. The scholarship (and here I consider the history discipline primarily) has largely focused on the study of how ruling elites imposed sumptuary laws or invented national dress, an approach that analysed the history of dress from the top down or which looked at the way the upper classes modernized.6 This is understandable because in the period of colonization and nationalism, it was the ruling elites who introduced dress reform. This scholarship made some important contributions to the field of dress studies. First, pioneering work on the meaning of clothing or what constitutes undress has called attention to the limitations of a solely Eurocentric theoretical perspective on dress and fashion.7 Second, Rebecca Earle’s brilliant work on Latin 5

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Elizabeth Bucar, Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). A select list of these excellent pioneering monographs includes: Regina A. Root, Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Valerie Steele and John S. Major (eds.), China Chic: East Meets West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Regina A. Root (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005); Mina Roces and Louise Edwards (eds.), The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2007); Sandra A. Neissen, Anne Marie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones (eds.), Re-orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress (Oxford: Berg, 2003). Christopher Y. Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 285–321; Barbara A. Sommer, ‘Wigs, Weapons, Tattoos and Shoes: Getting Dressed in Colonial Amazonia and Brazil’, in Roces and Edwards (eds.), The Politics of Dress, 200–14.

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America, revealing the way constructions of race were linked to clothing, dress practice, and deportment and suggesting the ‘transnaturing power’ of clothing in its ability to change the bodies of the wearers, was a unique theoretical contribution whose implications extend well beyond dress studies.8 And finally, the region which represents the majority of the world’s population is a potential site for studies that suggest alternative centres of fashion that were not Western in orientation. Two examples illustrate this possibility: (1) the rise of global Islamic fashion which of course has its centre in the Middle East is a potential rival to the dominant Western fashion trend-setters in contemporary times, and (2) the success of popular culture from Japan and Korea producing its own set of celebrity idols mimicked by Southeast Asia and China shows that the West is not the only source for role models for contemporary youth cultures and subcultures. These catalyst factors shape this chapter.

power-dressing in the age of empire The clash of cultures that accompanied Western imperialism in the Asia-Pacific was most visibly expressed through clothing, dress, and bodily practices. Ideological conflicts played themselves out over disputes about who was allowed to wear shoes or various head-coverings. Colonial encounters with Indigenous peoples also highlighted the contrasting views on what constituted the dressed or undressed body. Since colonization was also legitimized with the discourse of a mission to civilize local populations, Western styles of dress, bodily practices and deportment, and etiquette were introduced in the colonies. From the point of view of the Western colonizers, nudity or nakedness was the mark of an uncivilized body – a savage. Ruth Barcan’s book on the cultural anatomy of nudity revealed its 8

Rebecca Earle, ‘Nationalism and National Dress in Spanish America’, in Roces and Edwards (eds.), The Politics of Dress, 163–181; Rebecca Earle, ‘Race, Clothing and Identity: Sumptuary Laws in Colonial Spanish America’, 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), 325–45.

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Eurocentric bias when she theorized this symbolic association with the explanation that nakedness was interpreted as closer to the natural state of animals (read savage) and that is why cartoons depicting clothed animals were considered ‘funny’ and ironical.9 The first impressions that British travellers had of India was the ‘nakedness’ of the Indians they encountered.10 Asian and Pacific cultures, however, had a different definition of what constituted a state of undress or dress. In India the naked male was considered to be ‘wearing the sky’; a visual marker of a sadhu or a holy man or Hindu ascetic who has renounced the secular world.11 In Java prior to the arrival of the Dutch, the royal court etiquette required ‘the male torso to be uncovered as evidence courtiers and vassals were not concealing weapons’.12 The Western semiotic connection between the nude body and savagery largely explained why ‘clothing the native’ was intrinsic to the imperial project of civilizing colonized peoples. Missionaries in colonial Spanish America tried to stamp out nudity by mandating modest clothing for religious services.13 As Barbara Sommer noted for colonial Brazil, Western dress signified Christianity, civilization, and submission to the Portuguese king; an observation that could be applied to the colonial histories of the region.14 In actual practice, colonial rule resulted in varieties of hybrid dress combining elements of the myriad traditional wear of the Indigenous people and that of the Western colonizer. This hybrid dress was usually worn by the elites or the wealthy Indigenous inhabitants. In colonial Java, Javanese officials of the Indies colonial service ‘wore stiff-necked shirts, bow-ties, and dark jackets 9 10

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Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Oxford: Berg, 2004). Susan S. Bean, ‘Gandhi and Khadi, the Fabric of Independence’, in Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (eds.), Cloth and the Human Experience (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 331. William Cooke, ‘Nudity in India in Custom and Ritual’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 49 (1919), 243–4; Kama MacLean, ‘Making the Colonial State Work for You: The Modern Beginnings of the Ancient Kumbh Mela in Allahabad’, Journal of Asian Studies, 62/3 (2003), 881, n.17. Jean Gelman Taylor, ‘Identity, Nation and Islam: A Dialogue about Men’s and Women’s Dress in Indonesia’, in Roces and Edwards (eds.), The Politics of Dress, 102. Earle, ‘Race, Clothing and Identity’, 343. 14 Sommer, ‘Wigs’, 200.

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encrusted in braid like the official Dutch work jacket; they covered the head with a tubular hat or batik cloth wrapper, and the lower part of the body in a batiked kain’ (sarong or wrap-around skirt).15 In Spanish colonial Philippines, native local officials wore a combination of European shirt with native-style loose pants and embroidered slippers and European accessories such as the hat and cane. However, disparities between the powerful and the subjected peoples were still maintained through sumptuary laws that prevented the colonized subjects from adopting the full regalia of the colonizers’ attire. The Javanese were forbidden to wear shoes as these were reserved for the Europeans with the exception of those who were soldiers in the colonial army.16 In colonial Spanish America the colonizers ‘issued repeated orders prohibiting Amerindians from wearing a range of garments containing silk, velvet, Holland cloth, lace and other embellishments’.17 Thus, the colonizers used sumptuary laws to maintain the colonial hierarchy and proclaim visually who was ruler and who was the subject. However, not all Asian countries were formally colonized by Western powers. In the mid-nineteenth century both Japan and Siam were pressured to sign unequal treaties with Western powers. The threat to national sovereignty motivated the ruling elites in both places to strengthen their states against further foreign incursions by modernizing their military, polity, and bureaucracy and radically altering their infrastructure from economy and business, to education and telecommunications. Dress reform was incredibly important as a visual marker of Westernization and the adoption of Western dress and hairstyles, fashion, bodily practices, deportment and etiquette signalled the nation’s commitment to modernity and in the case of Siam, presenting Siamese bodies as ‘civilized’ subjects.

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Jean Gelman Taylor, ‘Costume and Gender in Colonial Java, 1800–1940’, in Henk Schulte Nordholt (ed.), Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997), 97. Henk Schulte Nordholt, ‘Introduction’, in Nordholt (ed.), Outward Appearances, 21. Earle, ‘Race, Clothing and Identity’, 325.

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In the age of empire modernization was synonymous with Westernization. Thus, power-dressing in the age of empire meant adopting Western clothing practices. Ruling elites in Siam and Japan who modernized their states in response to the threat of Western imperialism engaged in the politics of appearances when they demanded that their class and their subjects alter their traditional clothing to refashion themselves as ‘civilized’ in the eyes of the European and Atlantic powers who forced them to sign unequal treaties. But elites in each Asia-Pacific context had their own unique style of power-dressing – ranging from hybrid dress to adopting full regalia and the military uniform (including moustaches). They did not simply mimic Western attire. Finally, powerdressing in the age of empire had gendered consequences as women became relegated to the status of ‘bearers of nation’ as men in Western dress (especially military uniforms) became symbols of the modern nation. Maurizio Peleggi’s pioneering book on the fashioning of the Siamese monarchy’s modern image argued that ‘far from being a by-product of the wider process of administrative and institutional reformation, the refashioning of the royal elite’s public image was a key element in the project of asserting their “civilized” status and, consequently, their claim to “national” leadership . . . By contemplating themselves in their new clothes, new domestic settings, and new urban spaces, the Siamese court ended up convincing themselves, above all, of being modern.’18 The refashioning of the monarch’s image had to begin with the royal self. While photographs in the 1870s revealed the king attired in hybrid dress with the upper torso in a jacket and wearing a Prussian-style pointed helmet, he still wore the chongkrabaen (pantaloons or a long rectangular cloth worn around the lower body). By the mid-1890s, the photographic record showed that the chongkrabaen was replaced with trousers. The king decided to represent himself in Western military uniform including a helmet adorned with feathers.19 In an official painting of the royal family by Odoardo Gelli in 1899, the king wore a European-style military 18

19

Maurizio Peleggi, Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 3. Ibid., 59–60.

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Figure 31.3 Portrait of the Thai royal family painted by Odoardo Gelli in 1899. Courtesy of the Bureau of the Royal Household, Thailand. Photograph in the public domain.

uniform, while his wife attired in a Western frock sat next to him in a languid pose holding a fan as an accessory, surrounded by their three young children in Victorian-style sailor suits (Figure 31.3). The portrait was striking not just because the royal family was dressed much like the royal families in Europe including the sailor suits popularized in Victorian England, but also because it illustrated that Westernization went beyond the adoption of clothing to the adoption of consumption patterns since the domestic interiors showcased in the painting included classical statues from Western Europe, Grecian urns, French Louis XVIstyle furniture, and a bear-skin rug. These material objects illustrated that the adoption of Western dress was also accompanied by a change in consumption practices as the monarchy and the Siamese elite developed a taste for European luxury goods such as Fabergé objects from St Petersburg, jewellery from Berlin, Tiffany

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vases from New York City, paintings and sculptures from Florence, and porcelain sets from Sèvres.20 During his trips to Europe in 1897 and 1907 King Chulalongkorn and his entourage enjoyed shopping for bronze statues, cameras, toys, and even rocking chairs.21 The king served European food and Western-style entertainment at official banquets.22 King Chulalongkorn’s adoption of the handshake as a form of greeting senior officials broke the traditional cultural taboos that prohibited gazing at and touching the royal body.23 It needs to be stressed that these Western adaptations were extremely radical even for the royal family. This consumption of Western goods and practices exhibited by the Siamese elite would eventually influence the growing middle class and general public.24 The Meiji Restoration in Japan (1868–1912) which Westernized and modernized the nation to the point that it was able to defeat a Western power (Russia in 1905) and later become an imperialist annexing Korea in 1910 was the Asian success story. Japan’s Westernization, however, was on its own terms. The modernization project launched in the Meiji Restoration included major dress reform and the introduction of radical sumptuary laws (Figures 31.4 and 31.5). Like Siam, the Meiji emperor represented himself in public in Western dress, particularly the military uniform, with new habits of hair and deportment.25 The emperor issued an Internal Command on Clothing Reform that mandated yofuku (Western clothing) for government officials. But the aristocracy was anxious that adopting full Western dress would erase the social hierarchies of distinction, and that relinquishing traditional garb would start the process of eroding their cultural heritage.26 Hence, traditional attire was still allowed for specific 20 21

22 25

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Ibid., 26. Sud Chonchirdsin, ‘The Ambivalent Attitudes of the Siamese Elite towards the West during the Reign of King Chulalongkorn, 1868–1919’, South East Asia Research, 17/3 (2009), 445. Ibid., 453. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 454. Barbara Molony, ‘Gender, Citizenship and Dress in Modernizing Japan’, in Roces and Edwards (eds.), The Politics of Dress, 82. Yoshinori Osakabe, ‘Dressing up during the Meiji Restoration: A Perspective on Fukusei (Clothing Reform)’, in Kyunghee Pyun and Aida Yuen Wong (eds.), Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 35 and 40.

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Figure 31.4

Emperor Meiji in 1873 in Western dress typical of European monarchs. Alamy Stock Photo, 2BCY3EY.

events such as tea ceremonies, in a deliberate effort to preserve traditional apparel of deep cultural significance.27 In the end, the Japanese practice was for civil servants to wear Western clothes when they went to work in the public sphere but they changed to Japanese-style clothing (wafuku) when they returned to the privacy of their own homes.28 Western uniforms were introduced not just for the new professionalised military but also for the police force among other institutions. Men’s hairstyles exchanged the samurai-style topknots in favour of Western coiffures after 1862.29 The military adopted a French-style continental military uniform and then moved to

27

Ibid., 36–7.

28

Ibid.

29

Molony, ‘Gender, Citizenship and Dress’, 85.

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Figure 31.5 Empress Shoken (Haruko) in Western formal dress. Notice the unshaved eyebrows. Alamy Stock Photo, W5X905.

a German model from 1885 to 1886.30 In 1874 the police uniform was regulated including the wearing of ‘a black woollen hat with a badge worn on the hat or sleeve, double breasted jacket, trousers, with gold or silver put on the side of the trousers and yellow lines to denote rank’.31 The Western uniform worn by the police also exuded a ‘spectacle of authority’ in the streets of Japan which divided the population visually into the civilian population who 30

31

Michiyo Nomura, ‘A Spectacle of Authority on the Streets: Police Uniforms in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea’, in Pyun and Wong (eds.), Fashion, Identity, and Power, 119. Ibid.

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were still attired in traditional dress and the modern men in uniform responsible for disciplining them.32 After China’s defeat to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, new reforms were introduced in the Qing court. This included the formation of a ‘New Army’ in 1902 which was ‘dressed in German-style uniforms, which were already in use in Japan’.33 Instead of loose trousers and a loose coat, they wore narrow-legged pants and body-fitting coats tailored in the Western style and military officials replaced their cone-shaped hats and red tassels and cloth boots with peaked caps and leather boots.34 Similar to Japan, the New Army of the Qing court began to look less Chinese and more like the modern soldier elsewhere in the world.35 The adoption of Western dress in colonial Asia had gendered implications. While feminists advocated the adoption of Western dress for school and work, women’s adoption of the Western frock, cosmetics, bobbed or permed hair, plucked eyebrows, high heels and the cigarette, etc., raised anxieties since women were expected to continue to be bearers and wearers of national tradition at a time when their societies were undergoing rapid changes. The rise of the Modern Girl in the Asian context in the early decades of the twentieth century resulted in moral panics about rapid Westernization and modernization (since the term during the colonial period was associated with Westernization) at a time when anti-colonial movements were blossoming. In Burma, for example, British colonial rule influenced men’s fashion so that elite Burmese men cropped their hair (in lieu of a topknot), and wore belts with their longyi and shoes instead of slippers.36 Men’s adoption of these Western hybrid fashions did not have the same effect as women’s adoption of the sheer blouse, high heels, cosmetics (lipstick, face powder, and blusher), bobbed hair, and new bodily practices such as cleaning the face with soap and moisturizing with lotion.37 Representations of the modern Burmese girl in periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s associated her with immorality, consumerism, 32 35 36

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Ibid. 33 Finnane, Changing Clothes in China, 72–3. 34 Ibid., 73. Ibid. Chie Ikeya, ‘The Modern Burmese Woman and the Politics of Fashion in Colonial Burma’, Journal of Asian Studies, 67/4 (2008), 1282. Ibid., 1277–308.

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and ‘foreign-ness’. Although these images were mere fabrications, the early twentieth century introduced revolutionary changes to women’s lives as they entered educational institutions and improved their literacy rates so that by the 1920s the first female doctors, barristers-at-law, school principals, and educational administrators appeared in the public sphere.38 These changes, coupled with the influx of migrant men in the workforce (which was interpreted as taking jobs away from local Burmese men) contributed to what Chie Ikeya has termed a ‘crisis of masculinity’ that reached a climax in the late 1930s when Buddhist monks harassed fashionable women and attempted to tear their sheer blouses with hooks and scissors, exposing torso undergarments.39

what shall i wear to the revolution? fashioning the nation When Mohandas K. Gandhi met with King George V for afternoon tea at Buckingham Palace in London in 1931, he appeared attired in nothing else but a loincloth of homespun textile (khadi). This choice of dress was deliberate and intrinsically related to the Indian nationalist movement’s strategies for gaining independence (swaraj) from Britain. Boycotting foreign goods was powerfully demonstrated through protests that involved the burning of imported clothing, and the campaign encouraging all Indians to wear khadi. Gandhi had proposed khadi as the solution to India’s poverty, and rejecting foreign goods became fundamental in the struggle for home rule. His comment to journalists who asked about his choice of clothes for the meeting with the British sovereign was: ‘The King had enough on for both of us.’ This statement underscored the contrast between British opulence and Indian anticolonial cultural attributes of poverty and simplicity.40 In just one major appearance, Gandhi asserted moral superiority over the colonial power. But the fact that he was able to breach British etiquette and get away with it was evidence of the success of his unique form of power-dressing. This sartorial display in a diplomatic context 38 40

Ibid. 39 Ibid. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 80–1. See also Bean, ‘Gandhi and Khadi’, 367–8.

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was a potent example of the way anti-colonial movements in the Global South expressed their nationalist agendas visibly through the rejection of Western dress. Gandhi’s half-naked appearance in front of the British monarch in the royal palace setting also illustrated the way colonized peoples dismissed the Eurocentric discourse that nudity was associated with savagery. Susan Bean goes as far as to say that Gandhi in a loincloth sitting among formally attired Englishmen ‘communicated his disdain for civilization as it is understood in the West, his disdain for material possessions, his pride in Indian civilization, as well as his power – an ordinary man would not have been granted entry. By dealing openly with a man in mahatma garb, the British accepted his political position and revealed their loss of power.’41 Gandhi’s dress had also overturned the Western yardstick for what was civilized, and superior. The rejection of Western dress was absolutely essential to Gandhi and the Indian National Congress’ campaign to overthrow British rule. Scholars Susan Bean and Emma Tarlo give us excellent analyses of Gandhi ‘as semiotician’, alerting us to his many experiments with dress in his project of creating a garment that would visually unite the entire subcontinent.42 Indeed, Gandhi’s wardrobe from youth to maturity ranged the entire spectrum from full formal European dress to the loincloth which he wore from 1921 until his death.43 In his early years, much like the ruling elites of Siam and Meiji Japan discussed above, when Gandhi returned home from England as a barrister, he ‘promoted westernization of his household, begun by him and his brother, by adding items of European dress. Gandhi believed his success was dependent on westernization.’44 However, by 1909–11, ‘he criticised the idea that European dress could have a civilising effect on the Indian people’.45 One of the central tenets of the Indian nationalist movement involved non-cooperation and by 1920 the boycott of imported (British) cloth.46 Instead of wearing foreign cloth Gandhi hoped that every Indian would be wearing homespun fabric. Gandhi claimed that spinning was an act of prayer (a mantra) 41 42 43 45

Bean, ‘Gandhi and Khadi’, 368. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 62–128; Bean, ‘Gandhi and Khadi’. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 74–6. 44 Bean, ‘Gandhi and Khadi’, 356. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 68. 46 Ibid., 87.

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and encouraged every Indian to spin for at least half an hour a day to purify individual sin.47 C. A. Bayly alerted us to the way Gandhi’s use of white homespun tapped into traditional beliefs in the transformative power of cloth in Indian society. Because of its porous quality, cloth had the ability to trap one’s spiritual or ‘bio-moral’ essence and therefore had the potential to be either polluting or purifying. In Gandhi’s schema, ‘khadi in his hands regained its transformative and magical qualities, while the spinning wheel took its place in the Congress flag’.48 By associating foreign cloth with ‘sinfulness’ and khadi with morality, Gandhi hoped to persuade Indians to adopt it as a symbol of national unity.49 Since dress is a form of text, it can have multiple interpretations that can differ from the one intended by the wearer. Emma Tarlo argues convincingly that against Gandhi’s wishes, audiences interpreted his use of the khadi loincloth as the sign of a ‘holy man’, an ascetic or a sadhu invoking traditional meanings of naked men in Indian society, rather than as a symbol of India’s poverty (Figure 31.6). Although Gandhi had failed to convince his countrymen to abandon foreign cloth which was finer and cheaper than the coarse khadi, this did not minimize its importance as central to the Indian nationalist movement.50 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (1966–76) could be raised as the classic example of a nation’s almost complete rejection of Western dress and Western values/civilization. As Valerie Steele and John Major eloquently expressed it, ‘when the Communists came to power in China in 1949, they inaugurated not only a social but also a sartorial revolution’.51 In keeping with the socialist ideal of removing class distinctions, everyone was supposed to dress simply in drab colours such as blue, green, or grey with women in Lenin suits and men in Sun Yat-sen suits in cotton cloth.52 During this period Western fashion was targeted as ‘foreign’, ‘feudal’, and fatally ‘bourgeois’.53 The revolutionary 47 49 51

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Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi’, 313–14. 48 Ibid., 314. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 101–5. 50 Ibid., 62–128. Valerie Steele and John S. Major, ‘Fashion Revolution: The Maoist Uniform’, in Valerie Steele and John S. Major (eds.), China Chic: East Meets West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 55. Finnane, Changing Clothes, 205. Steele and Major, ‘Fashion Revolution’, 59–61.

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Figure 31.6 Mohandas K. Gandhi attired in a loincloth spinning khadi (homespun cloth) in Sabarmati in the late 1940s. Alamy Stock Photo, C5335T.

situation branded fashion as ‘shameful’, ‘sinful and antirevolutionary’, and too frivolous for the serious task of making revolution.54 Those who refused to conform were punished through ‘sartorial terrorism’ in which their offending fashionable dresses or clothes were stripped off their bodies and cut to ribbons, and their permed hair chopped off by the zealous and vigilant fashion police – the youthful Red Guards who spearheaded the movement.55 Conformity was demanded, and a de-gendering of dress in which men and women wore similar clothing became the norm. Dress could not be separated from socialist ideology and aims since it was the visible expression of socialist national identities. In addition, clothing practices were instilled with moral implications as Western fashion was branded as ‘immoral’ – and stood for the Other. 54 55

Juanjuan Wu, Chinese Fashion: From Mao to Now (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 2. Steele and Major, ‘Fashion Revolution’, 59–60.

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Since the Red Guards were the frontline soldiers in this cultural revolution against the four olds (old ideology, culture, habits, customs/cultures), the military uniform became the national attire. The Red Guards displayed their militant stance through wearing their fathers’ old People’s Liberation Army uniforms or sewed their own replicas in dyed green cloth. These jackets were accessorized with ‘soft cloth caps with red star insignia, and belts with broad metallic buckles, as well as self-made red armbands’, and the ubiquitous Mao Zedong’s little red book.56 Men and women wore jackets and trousers made of cotton or a mix of cotton and synthetic fibres with cuts that did not show one’s figure. Underneath the jackets they wore knitted jumpers and white shirts and tops.57 Frugality was the motto: ‘we lived simply and modestly, wore patched clothing, cut our hair short and combed it smooth’.58 Conformity implied the end of individual freedoms.59 Since both sexes wore similar clothing styles, and since Mao Zedong argued that women held up half the sky and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) argued for gender equality, did fashion styles mirror the degendering of Chinese society? On first glance, yes, Red Guards (young men and women) in military uniform, and everyone else in simple, frugal plain clothes with no accessories presented a society where gender differences were blurred. Feminist scholars argued, however, that nuances in women’s dress articulated difference. Rosemarie Roberts’ study of the theatrical costume of the model works (yangbanxi) performed during the Cultural Revolution demonstrated that the women’s costumes were tailored to become figure hugging, and hair, accessories, and colours contributed to women’s sexualization in the gendering of the revolutionary body.60 Antonia Finnane also noted that the chorus line in the ballet The Red Detachment of Women was ‘skimpily dressed’.61 Heroines in these 56

57

58 60

61

Li Li, ‘Uniformed Rebellion, Fabricated Identity: A Study of Social History of Red Guards in Military Uniforms during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Beyond’, Fashion Theory, 14/4 (2010), 440. Verity Wilson, ‘Dress and the Cultural Revolution’, in Steele and Major (eds.), China Chic, 170–1. Ibid.,171. 59 Steele and Major, ‘Fashion Revolution’, 58. Rosemary Roberts, ‘Gendering the Revolutionary Body: Theatrical Costume in Cultural Revolution China’, Asian Studies Review, 30 (2006), 141–59. Finnane, Changing Clothes, 239.

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films, operas, and ballets were depicted in the opening scenes as attired in ‘graceful, stylised folk dress’ signifying a ‘semi-feudal, semi-colonial era’, but by the end of the epic story they exchanged these inappropriate forms of dress for a stylized, tailored version of the military uniform reflecting their metamorphosis into the model soldier.62 In The Red Detachment of Women, the slave girl who was liberated from a cruel landlord had to ‘overcome the gap between being a woman and being a communist soldier’ and she was admonished for putting revenge against her landlord ahead of Communist conformity (Figure 31.7).63 I suggest that the fact that it was a female character that had to undergo the transformation by shunning her feudal past and embracing the dress of the revolutionary soldier, implied that women continued to be considered bearers and wearers of national tradition. Women were singled out as most needing to be re-educated into learning the correct ideologies and appropriate dress.64 The close association between ideology and dress continued into the early 1980s. When the CCP launched the ‘anti-Spiritual Pollution’ campaign in 1983, one primary school in Kunming, a city in southwestern China, declared jeans (the Chinese term for it ‘cowboy cloth’ locating its historical origins in the United States of America – the symbol of Western ‘decadence’) to be ‘spiritually polluting’.65 It was only in the mid-1980s that public campaigns around dress and ideology were finally suspended.66 The fashioning of new nations involved the rejection of Western clothing. In order to invent modern national identities, newly formed states needed a new wardrobe – a change of clothes, to mark the new era free of Western imperial influence. Antonia Finnane’s comment that Chinese citizens ‘wore the nation on 62 63

64 65

66

Ibid., 238–9. Li Li, ‘Revolutionary Culture, Girl Power and the Red Guard Uniform during the Chinese Cultural Revolution’, in Jane Tynan and Lisa Godson (eds.), Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 53–4. See also ibid. Tom McDonald, ‘“Cowboy Cloth” and Kinship: The Closeness of Denim Consumption in a South-West Chinese City’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 9/1 (2011), 78. Wu, Chinese Fashion, 1.

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Figure 31.7 A scene from the ballet The Red Detachment of Women in the 1972 production. White House photo by Byron Schumaker. Alamy Stock Photo, 2B012ET.

their backs’ applied to the experiences of Asia-Pacific countries who won independence from their Western colonizers from about the mid-twentieth century.67 As nations defined themselves they also invented national dress in their own terms, remaking distinct traditional textiles and styles into new modern versions of these individual identities. These changes though were always deeply gendered. In India, by the end of the nineteenth century middleclass and elite men had adopted Western suits and ties and by the early twentieth century all ambitious men aspired to wear these items.68 Most women, however, continued to wear the sari which in Gandhi’s time symbolized the ‘exemplary dress of uncorrupted (and Hinduised) India, with the Indian woman transformed into the guardian of the hearth, home, and traditional values’.69 In this sense, men in Western suits stood for ‘modernity’ and the future 67 68

69

Finnane, Changing Clothes, 17. Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber, ‘India and Fashion’s New Geography’, in Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis (London: Routledge, 2013), 44. Ibid., 45.

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and they as the majority of political leaders, exercised power. Women, in Indian dress, stood for tradition and links to the past.

couture and the modern nation Once Asia and Pacific nations became independent states and were well into the project of nation-building, the negative valence associated with Western dress/fashion so closely tied to the experience of colonial rule began to disappear. The globalization of fashion that included the rise of luxury brand names which reached its height in the 1980s influenced the dress histories of this wide region. From about the 1970s onwards, I argue that Asia and Pacific nations used couture to claim that they were ‘Third World No More’, and therefore deserved to move up in the global hierarchy of nations.70 A Brazilian initiative is particularly significant in this regard. Brazil decided to bypass the official calendar for the São Paulo Fashion Week shifting the Autumn/Winter collection from January to October/November and the Spring/Summer collection to March and April. If Brazil continued to abide by the official calendar, the collections by Brazilian designers would only appear six months behind the Global North reflecting the Southern Hemisphere’s actual seasons.71 This radical initiative signalled ‘Brazil’s national ambition to have a fashion industry befitting its status as the world’s sixth economic power in 2013’.72 In order to achieve this ambitious aim, Brazilian young designers since the 1990s strived for a global reputation as leading innovators of fashion rather than as imitators of European and North American labels.73 Brent Luvaas pointed out that in the twenty-first century ‘design and marketing happen on one side of the globe; manufacture the other’.74 In this global divide countries such as Indonesia aspired to break away from what Luvaas aptly described as ‘a decidedly post-millennial brand of global fashion marginality: the mark of the Third World sweatshop’.75 In order to 70 71

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Luvaas, ‘Third World No More’. Silvano Mendes and Nick Rees-Roberts, ‘Branding Brazilian Fashion: Global Visibility and Intercultural Perspectives’, in Bruzzi and Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures, 31. Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Luvaas, ‘Third World No More’, 204. 75 Ibid., 205.

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remove this derogatory reputation, Indonesia, as the fourth most populous nation with a growing economy of 6 per cent per year, and a growing middle class of more than 50 million people, paid close attention to fashion. Fashion labels partnered with the Ministry of Tourism and Industry, the British Council, and corporations to represent Indonesia as an emergent fashion centre not just a source of cheap labour for other countries’ products.76 Hence, one can make an argument that acquiring a global reputation as a city/country/state whose population has an acute sense of fashion with a critical mass of internationally known couturiers, has now become a symbol of a nation’s reputation as having achieved global modernity and cosmopolitanism. David Gilbert points out that ‘fashion is being used as a signifier of urban modernity and world status’.77 The Philippine example is instructive. From the early years of the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos (1972–86), First Lady Imelda Marcos used annual fashion shows (Bagong Anyo or New Shape) to legitimize the regime and to assure foreign investors and creditors that the Philippines was a stable, reliable country worth their investments. The audience for her Bagong Anyo shows (held at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines) in 1973 and 1974 included the Board of Governors of the Asian Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme Governing Council, respectively.78 She sponsored Filipino couturier Christian Espiritu’s fashion show in New York City to show the world that the Philippines aspired to be part of the global high status world of haute couture.79 In 1976, the Philippine contribution to Expo ’75 in Okinawa, Japan, was folk dancing by the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company and a fashion show parading couturier Christian Espiritu’s designs. According to Christian Espiritu the showcasing of Filipino couture was only Marcos’ way of ‘performing’ national status (palabas – 76 77

78

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Ibid., 205. 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. Bagong Anyo ’73 and ’74 programmes, original copies in the personal archives of SLIMS (Salvacion Higgins), one of the couturiers featured in the fashion shows. Interview with Christian Espiritu, Ayala Alabang, 26 June 2017.

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a show) without any substance behind it. In Espiritu’s view Imelda did not build an infrastructure that would enable designers to launch a local fashion industry. Despite the success of his New York fashion show Espiritu was unable to accept orders.80 It is no secret that Asian and Pacific nations aspired to be included in the list of the world’s fashion centres with Shanghai keen to restore its previous position in the 1930s as the ‘Paris of the East’.81 So far, Japan has been the only nation to have ‘made it’ to the exclusive club of international fashion centre cities that include Paris, Milan, London, and New York.82 Western fashion has never been so desired as a marker of demonstrating a nation’s modern status. Those countries like China and India whose rejection of Western dress/civilization was intrinsic to fashioning their new nations in the twentieth century, reversed their ideological positions from the 1980s and 1990s. Western fashion especially couture became the symbol of modernity and luxury. Post-Mao China ushered in a host of radical reforms that liberalized the economy and bringing in foreign investment and fashion became a priority in creating the new image of socialist China.83 From the mid-1980s onwards, Western styles were considered more fashionable than domestic ones and when fashion magazines made their appearance they became important mentors and arbiters in the project of teaching Chinese consumers how to acquire good taste in dress and fashion.84 After decades of disparaging the West for being ‘wicked’, ‘immoral’, ‘decadent’, and ‘wealthy’, suddenly Western fashion became in vogue.85 Pierre Cardin was the first Western haute couture designer to show his collection in China, in 1979, in fashion shows in Beijing and Shanghai.86 By the 1980s China’s political leaders approved the wearing of Western suits, benefiting Cardin’s business since up until the 1990s his fashion house ‘became virtually synonymous with fashion’ in China.87 As the way to career advancement in China involved a Western education overseas and the acquisition of Western consumer goods, Western fashion also began to stand for economic success: ‘an individual clad in high-quality branded 80 83 87

Ibid. 81 Gilbert, ‘From Paris to Shanghai’, 3. 82 Ibid., 3–32. Wu, Chinese Fashion, 65. 84 Ibid., 66. 85 Ibid., 164. 86 Ibid., 166. Ibid.

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clothes tends to receive nicer social treatment and also has better opportunities for social advancement’.88 Since the 1990s China’s rising middle class also aspired to Western branded goods and it became commonplace for middle-class urban women in office jobs to save for a Louis Vuitton handbag.89 In this sense, Chinese urban citizens were much like the urban youth elsewhere in the world (since the consumption of branded luxury goods is still very much an urban phenomenon).90 In India, the government ‘effectively welcomed consumer capitalism in the 1990s’ and the result was ‘a flood of brand-label clothing, accessories and beauty products and services’ and eventually high-end brands such as Christian Dior, Hermès, and Salvatore Ferragamo.91 It was Japanese designers who called attention to the Asian region as a place for innovation so that by the 1980s ‘for the first time, a non-western culture had significantly affected the global fashion system, and had done so by projecting an image of hypermodernism’.92 Valerie Steele notes that Japanese designers ‘dramatically transformed the world of fashion’ bringing to the fore ‘a radically new concept of fashion to the catwalks of Paris’, so much so that Barbara Vinken judged their debut as the beginning of ‘postfashion’.93 In other words, Japanese designers Kenzo, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons did not just show that they had the same status as the top fashion designers in the world, their work revolutionized Western fashion. But even though these designers did not want to think of themselves as specifically ‘Japanese’ that was still how they were perceived.94 Their designs were not particularly ‘Japanese’, but since their designs were perceived to be ‘nonWestern’ (with regards to construction, silhouettes, shapes, and print and fabric combinations), they were interpreted by Western audiences to be ‘Japanese’.95 Although these pioneer Japanese 88 91 92

93 95

Ibid., 175. 89 Ibid., 178. 90 Ibid., 182. Wilkinson-Weber, ‘India and Fashion’s New Geography’, 49. Valerie Steele, ‘Is Japan Still the Future?’, in Valerie Steele, Patricia Mears, Yuniya Kawamura, and Hiroshi Narumi (eds.), Japan Fashion Now (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 3. Ibid., 2–3. Vinken is quoted in 3. 94 Ibid., 22. Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 92 and 98.

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designers in Paris opened the doors for other Japanese designers to gain recognition in the European couture capital, all these designers were ‘still under the validation of the French system’ (especially because they established fashion houses in Paris).96 Interestingly, by the 1990s, it was Japanese popular culture especially street fashion located from various districts of Tokyo such as Harajuku that called attention to that city as a trend-setter. The youth styles of kogal (the school uniform usually comprising a sailor suit with very short skirts and loose knee socks), Lolita style (popular in Harajuku) where young women in their teens and twenties dressed up like little girls or dolls (frilly dresses in ‘pink or pale blue with a full skirt over petticoats, partly covered by a white apron, and with accessories such as Mary Jane shoes, a parasol and doll-like purse’), and cosplay (young men and women dress up like their favourite anime or manga characters) became known globally as Tokyo’s unique contribution to contemporary fashion.97 These styles were incredibly gendered and have been explained by the contemporary Japanese ‘cult of cuteness’ (kawaii) (Figure 31.8).98 Women in their twenties who wanted to dress up in school uniforms or like little dolls and whose deportment mimics children, all with the aim of appearing ‘cute’ (not sexy) did not appear to be empowering for women especially given that they continued to be disadvantaged in the workplace and in politics.99 Certainly these self-representations contrasted with the ideal images of Western women in fashionable clothes as ‘sexy’ or authoritative. The Japanese cult of cuteness introduced a novel ideal to women’s fashion internationally even though it infantilized the women who wore it.100 The style demonstrated the limited parameters of women’s roles in Japan: ‘this style illustrates that they are allowed, perhaps even expected, to be cute’.101 Cute or childlike women were seen to be less threatening to men.102 Not all scholars agreed with this interpretation. Brian McVeigh, who wrote a major study 96 98

99 102

97 Ibid., 98. Steele, ‘Is Japan Still the Future?’ Ibid., 48; Christy Tidwell, ‘Street and Youth Fashion in Japan’, in John E. Vollmer (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 6: East Asia (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 398. Tidwell, ‘Street and Youth Fashion in Japan’, 398. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. Brian J. McVeigh, Wearing Ideology: State, Schooling and Self-Presentation in Japan (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 147.

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Figure 31.8 Anime cosplay from Harajuku district in Tokyo, Japan – an example of ‘cute fashion’ (kawaii) in Japan. Photo taken 27 June 2015. Alamy Stock Photo, EY10NM.

on school uniforms in Japan, argued that ‘consuming cuteness’ could be interpreted as ‘resistance consumption’ because it ‘counters the dominant “male” productivist ideology or standardization, order, control, rationality and impersonality’, but Christy Tidwell cautioned that since ‘cuteness’ has a use-by date – in other words it is aspired to by women in interim years between schooling and marriage – its function as resistance to hegemonic cultural constructions of gender was limited.103 Additionally, the consumption of Western couture in this country was clearly gendered since 94 per cent of all Tokyo women in their twenties own something by Louis Vuitton (and Japanese consumption is responsible for a third of Louis Vuitton’s global sales).104 Hence, the consumption of couture is still very much linked to constructions of gender. 103 104

Ibid., 16 and 157–80; Tidwell, ‘Street and Youth Fashion in Japan’, 398. Steele, ‘Is Japan Still the Future?’, 25.

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The rise of Islamic fashion in the wake of the Islamic revivalist movement of the 1970s had an impact in the Asian countries with Muslim majorities, most especially in Indonesia, which is the world’s largest Islamic country, as well as Malaysia and Brunei. Veiling was not traditional practice in Southeast Asia and it only became popular in countries such as Indonesia in the 1990s.105 Prior to that time only older women who had completed the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) would be seen to wear a veil but this was a ‘gauzy, loose kerundung rather than the more opaque and closefitting jilbab’.106 Hence women who chose to veil in post-1990s Indonesia were not returning to tradition but instead were expressing a middle-class urban modernity (since women who veiled generally came from the middle classes and were educated university students living in the cities).107 Couture fashion raised anxieties for women in particular who grappled with the conundrum of whether it was possible to be fashionable and pious at the same time. Elizabeth Bucar has coined the term ‘pious fashion’ to describe the clothing choices of many Muslim women who wanted to dress modestly, express their Islamic identities and piety, but who also wanted to express publicly their good taste.108 In other words, in Indonesia, a headscarf combined with long sleeves and layered clothing could be both pious and attractive if done correctly: ‘pious fashion is extremely popular now; it is considered to demonstrate cosmopolitanism, sophistication, Muslim femininity and good taste’.109 Women’s magazines and fashion bloggers gave advice on how to achieve this coveted measure of aesthetics and beauty (which one could argue challenged reductionist Western ideals of the ‘sexy’ woman).110 Pious fashion was gendered feminine because ‘men’s clothing does not have to be “pious” in the same way’.111 In the gendering of fashion and nation in 105

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107 108 110

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Nancy J. Smith-Hefner, ‘Javanese Women and the Veil in Post-Soeharto Indonesia’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 66/2 (2007), 389–420. Carla Jones, ‘Fashion and Faith in Urban Indonesia’, Fashion Theory, 11/2–3 (2007), 217. Bucar, Pious Fashion, 22; Jones, ‘Fashion and Faith’. Bucar, Pious Fashion. 109 Ibid., 81. Ibid.; Jones, ‘Fashion and Faith’; Smith-Hefner, ‘Javanese Women and the Veil’. Bucar, Pious Fashion, 22.

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Indonesia, ‘men’s clothing is the marker of the nation’s power and modernity; women’s clothing is the marker of its morality, honor, and ethnic identity’.112 Couture and fashion remain important markers for modernity in the region and vital to Indonesia’s and other nations’ project of ‘annihilating’ any vestiges of Third World status that may remain.113 Thus, more than ever, women’s fashionable dress is crucial to nations’ contemporary national narrative that they are not just modern, but also cosmopolitan. In the opening of this chapter, I described the SONA events when politicians arrived by walking down a red carpet, celebrity-style, attired in couture versions of national dress. The press coverage of the dresses displayed on the catwalk threatened to overshadow the actual content of the presidential address. In this event, it was women’s dress (not men’s Barong Tagalog) that took the lion’s share of the limelight. That this most important day in which the most powerful politician delivered his report card for the year was accompanied by the glitz and glamour of national couture dress underscored the symbolic importance of fashion, nationalism, and gender in a nation’s self-representation as ultra-modern: because the costumes were chic and cosmopolitan; because the clothing was haute couture and made by a top couturier; and nationalist because they were in the shape of national or ethnic dress. The events also symbolized the nation’s wealth as the ternos and gowns worn by the women cost P30,000–50,000 or close to US$1,000, and the Barong Tagalog at P20,000–50,000 was considered very expensive in the Philippines.114

conclusion: decentring western fashion? This chapter approached the huge and diverse topic of dress, fashion, and modernity in the Asia-Pacific region through an examination of the way ruling elites have used dress and fashion in their 112 113

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Ibid. Xiaoping Li, ‘Fashioning the Body in Post-Mao China’, in Anne Brydon and Sandra A. Niessen (eds.), Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Transnational Body (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 87. Prices were quoted in the ABS-CBN television evening news coverage of SONA 2014.

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desire to embrace alternative modernities. I demonstrate that their strategies involved ambivalent responses to Western dress from embracing it in hybrid forms to rejecting it altogether. My choice in analysing dress, fashion, and modernity through this class lens was largely dictated by the scholarship in this field. That the scholarship in the field of dress history has concentrated on the elite class could be explained by the availability of primary sources especially visual sources on dress. Scholarship, especially in the contemporary era, has already begun to analyse the experiences of those in the middle or lower classes and I anticipate that scholars in the future will be doing more of the same. At the present writing there seems to be a vacuum in the area of non-heteronormative gender analyses. But given the blossoming of gender and sexuality studies in recent years, it would be safe to assume that this gap will be filled in the near future. Since the Asia-Pacific region boasts a plurality and diversity of sexualities and gender categories, especially in comparison with the Atlantic world (with Indonesia for example having five genders), there are fantastic possibilities for making original contributions to the field of global fashion. Finally, I would like to suggest that the Global South and the Asia-Pacific in particular is a rich site for suggesting possible approaches to decentring Western fashion or ‘provincializing Europe’ to borrow from Dipesh Chakrabarty.115 It is always assumed that the West, particularly Europe, is the centre of fashion with three of the five fashion capital cities located there. But Europe is not the only inspiration or the only fashion model for some populations in Asia. Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia look towards the Middle East as the centre of Islamic fashion, arguably Western fashion’s biggest rival for global influence. Japan and Korea, the centre of youth popular culture (J-Pop, K-Pop, anime, manga, television serials) is the new trend-setter for the younger generation. J-Pop and K-Pop idols have now become the celebrity role models for the youth in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as in the West. By 2000 Vietnam had the biggest market per capita for cosmetics especially skin care with Korean brands 115

Dipesh Charkrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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dominating the market.116 The women who buy these skin care products aim to be white like Koreans, not white like Europeans. With South Korea’s rise in economic power, it has become the epitome of modernity for Vietnamese.117 In other words, the West is not the only barometer for signifying modernity anymore.

select bibliography Bayly, Christopher Y., ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 285–321. Bean, Susan S., ‘Gandhi and Khadi, the Fabric of Independence’, in Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (eds.), Cloth and the Human Experience (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 355–76. Bucar, Elizabeth, Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Finnane, Antonia, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Ikeya, Chie, ‘The Modern Burmese Woman and the Politics of Fashion in Colonial Burma’, Journal of Asian Studies, 67/4 (2008), 1277–308. Li, Li, ‘Uniformed Rebellion, Fabricated Identity: A Study of Social History of Red Guards in Military Uniforms during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Beyond’, Fashion Theory, 14/4 (2010), 49–63. Luvaas, Brent, ‘Third World No More: Rebranding Indonesian Streetwear’, Fashion Practice, 5/2 (2013), 203–27. Peleggi, Maurizio, Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002). Roberts, Rosemary, ‘Gendering the Revolutionary Body: Theatrical Costume in Cultural Revolution China’, Asian Studies Review, 30 (2006), 141–59. Roces, Mina and Louise Edwards (eds.), The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2007). 116

117

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, ‘White Like Koreans: The Skin of the New Woman’, in S. Heijin Lee, Christina H. Moon, and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu (eds.), Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 21–40. Ibid.

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THE GLOBAL POLITICS OF WEARING, BUYING, AND SELLING EUROPEAN-STYLE DRESS, C. 1900–1930 hissako anjo, emi goto, and miki sugiura

introduction On the urban streets of Cairo, Tokyo, or Mombasa, around 1900– 1930s, clothing in multiple styles coexisted, including varied ‘European styles’, differently categorized in each location as part of local fashion culture: under full- or half-body covering veils, women in Cairo wore European-style dresses; next to groups of women in colourful kanga wrappers in Mombasa or meisen kimono in Tokyo, groups of working men wore uniform-like ‘Western’ business attire or simplified short-sleeved shirts and half-trousers. Until recently, the adoption and diffusion of European-style clothing has been mainly discussed by region or group, mostly within the framework of national history.1 However, in recent years, scholars have placed the process in much larger contexts, in terms of both time and scope. Overcoming binaries and dichotomies, the diffusion of European-style clothing is now analysed from a long-term perspective, placed as part of buoyant multidirectionally repercussive mobilizations, such as ‘appropriation’, ‘domestication’, ‘hybridization’, ‘reinvention of the traditional’, 1

For a recent survey of literature on the globalization of clothing that positions the role of Europeanization, see Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun, Fashion History: A Global View (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 171–81; Sandra Niessen, ‘Afterword: Fashion’s Fallacy’, in M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik (eds.), Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity through Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 209–17.

1123

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‘reorientation’, ‘indigenization’, or ‘the globalization of clothing’, many of which have been discussed at transnational and interregional scales.2 The main research question is undergoing a shift from ‘what was introduced’ at the initial phase of adoption of Western clothing to ‘what was created’ afterwards.3 With this turn, local agency is more fully emphasized. Wearing European-style clothing is no longer considered as an imposed practice, enforced by political regimes or globalized production systems, where wearers have no choice or motivation. Indeed, in analysing the interaction between imperialism and the adoption/ rejection of European-style clothing, Robert Ross noted that ‘wearing [European-style] clothes (and certainly not wearing them) is almost invariably a political act’, and the choices and act taken by local wearers amidst imperial and colonial conflicts should always be respected.4 Nevertheless, the conflicts surrounding wearing European-style clothing cannot be simply converged to the choice between adoption and rejection. As Karen Tranberg Hansen noted, ‘Clothes are not worn passively; they require people’s active involvement.’5 This holds true throughout the long-term process that covers not only the initial phase of encountering Western clothing but also the secondary phase of diffusion and reshaping, when European-style clothing was not entirely new, even to the eyes of non-wearers. The timing of the shift from the initial to the secondary phase differs to a certain extent from region to region. However, facing the zenith of imperialism and colonialism, many parts of the world

2

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4 5

See, among others, Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Some research has succeeded at elevating the discussion to transnational and interregional scale, such as Rui Ito¯, Hiroko Sakamoto, and Tani E. Barlow (eds.), Modan Gā ru to Shokuminchiteki Kindai: Higashi Ajia ni okeru Teikoku, Shihon, Jendā [Modern Girls and Colonial Modernity: Empire, Capital and Gender] (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 2010). See Chapter 34 by Karen Tranberg Hansen in this volume. See also the chapters by Melissa Bellanta (Chapter 20 in Volume I) and Mina Roces (Chapter 31) which also address this question. Robert Ross, Clothing: A Global History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 169. Karen Tranberg Hansen, ‘Introduction’, in Karen Tranberg Hansen and D. Soyini Madison (eds.), African Dress: Fashion, Agency, Performance (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 3.

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the global politics of european-style dress

in the period 1900–1930s should be seen as being in the secondary phase, in which people worldwide were pursuing what Tranberg Hansen has called ‘clothing competence’.6 In other words, wearers were shaping skills and accumulating components to configure ‘a total look’, interacting with various external and internal inspirations and reflecting conflicts surrounding the wearer and body.7 Closely linked with this pursuit, components and dressing skills surrounding ‘European-style clothing’ were constantly reshaped – some newly created, some mixed, some abandoned, some even readopted – embodying both resistance and renewal.8 Multiple wearers, buyers, and sellers were involved in this process. This chapter focuses on 1900–1930s Egypt, Japan, and East Africa, where we explore the complex contexts surrounding wearing, buying, and selling European-style dress from three perspectives: abandonment, conformity, and copying. We focus on specific sets of garments and their components to illuminate the practice, needs, and conflicts of the wearers, buyers, and sellers as well as the political and cultural climate surrounding the attire.9 First, wearing, adapting, and shaping European-style dress in its own context was inevitably accompanied by abandoning other items. Abandonment of items had its own timeline. Unveiling is one example, where the wearer’s domain of agency, in particular, becomes clear. As much as veiling, unveiling should be analysed carefully, balancing the political and cultural contexts.10 The first section thus focuses on unveiling in Egypt and reveals the contexts 6

7 8

9

10

Ibid. See also Karen Tranberg Hansen, ‘Fashioning: Zambian Moments’, Journal of Material Culture, 8/3 (2003), 301–9. Tranberg Hansen, ‘Introduction’, 3. Hissako Anjo and Antonia Finnane, ‘Tailoring in China and Japan: Cultural Transfer and Cutting Techniques in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 263–88. A similar approach is taken in 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, 65–84. Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity 1870–1940 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

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associated with people’s social positions, experiences, and emotions that made the abandonment of veils problematic and controversial. Second, we place conformity – what Simmel theorized as the pressure to conform and the desire to keep up appearances – as part of active involvement in achieving ‘clothing competence’ and shaping a look.11 Throughout the secondary phase, conformity played a critical role, though which habitus to conform to constantly changed.12 The dilemma surrounding conformity is revealed particularly well in the buying process. Purchasing European style was never inexpensive, even in the secondary phase when increasing numbers of tailor shops and second-hand markets made it available to the middle stratum of society. The second section of the chapter demonstrates the working of conformity within the dilemma around purchasing Western male business attire among Japanese white-collar workers. Last, copying and imitating has been acknowledged as a key process throughout the expansion of the global circulation of textile products.13 Studies looking at domestication and transculturalization have highlighted the long-term transformations of adopted and import-substituted European-style products, covering the secondary phase of diffusion.14 However, far fewer studies have examined the impact of third countries’ production and sale of European-style items, such as Chinese- or Japanese-produced European-style hats, shoes, or shirts in the 1900s–1930s, whose 11

12

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14

Georg Simmel, Philosophie der Mode/Zur Psychologie der Mode: Zwei Essays (Berlin: Pan-Verlag o. J., 1905), trans. David Frisby and Mike Feathersone (London: Sage, 1998), 187–205. Tommy Tse and Ling Tung Tsang, ‘Reconceptualising Prosumption beyond the “Cultural Turn”: Passive Fashion Prosumption in Korea and China’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 13/3 (2018), 283–305. Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell (eds.), Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean: An Ocean of Cloth (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Imitating is positioned as an integral part of early modern textile development: see, among others, Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Frank Dikötter, Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Alba F. Aragón, ‘The Rhetoric of Fashion in Latin America’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., Harvard University, 2013).

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disruption of the initial European, in particular British, colonial production networks characterized the second phase.15 The last section deals more with the question of distribution than the previous sections and focuses on the export of Japanese shirts to East Africa and demonstrates how these shirts were placed within multiple clothing style categories, and also how and with what effect Japanese merchants reinvented the notion of selling copies of European products. These three case studies suggest multifaceted contexts surrounding wearing, buying, and selling European-style dress in the period 1900–1930s.

the contexts of abandonment: veiling and unveiling in egypt, 1899–1923 Most studies of the history of clothing have focused on the process of adoption rather than abandonment. The latter, however, is especially important for the modern period, as the disappearance of some local items has often been presented as a part of the Europeanization of dress.16 This section explores the process of abandoning clothing, taking women’s veils in Egypt as an example. Unveiling, or the discarding of traditional covering attire, began to take place gradually in the late nineteenth century and continued until the first half of the twentieth century. At this time, Egypt, then a semi-independent state of the Ottoman Empire and under British control, was experiencing the rapid Europeanization of knowledge, culture, and lifestyle. While the adoption of Europeanstyle dress became more common, for many Egyptian women of the period the veil was one of the ‘last indigenous elements’ to be abandoned.17 15

16

17

On recent Chinese impacts: Marcel Hoogenboom, Duco Bannink, and Willem Trommel, ‘From Local to Global, and Back’, Business History, 52/6 (2010), 932–54. Yedida Kalfon Stillman’s work, which covers the entire history of Arab dress, describes, for example, the abandonment of ‘traditional, loose-flowing garments in favour of Western tailored clothes’. Yedida Kalfon Stillman, Arab Dress: A Short History from the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times, ed. Norman A. Stillman (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 163. This expression was used in the conclusion of Nancy Micklewright’s ‘Women’s Dress in 19th Century Istanbul: Mirror of a Changing Society’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1986), 217. Micklewright wrote that

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In what follows, we will show by analysing narratives from the first decades of the twentieth century that what has usually been described as ‘veiling’ had layered meanings. Ultimately, the controversy over veiling and unveiling in modern Egypt reveals the complexity of abandonment of clothing practices. Unveiling was not a simple reaction to the adoption of European clothing; rather, it was a creative process through which the locals sought to find their own meanings for clothing styles. The adoption of European-style clothing was observed among the members of the royal harem from the mid-1800s and was popularized towards the end of the century.18 During this period, Egyptian society was roughly divided into the ruling elites, many of which were of Turkish origin, Indigenous Egyptian white-collar workers educated within the modern system, and others, including blue-collar workers and peasants. The majority of the population was Muslim; minorities included Egyptian Copts (Orthodox Christians) and Jews. Foreign influences grew with the number of foreigners in the country. In fashion, people generally looked to France, though Egypt had been occupied by the British since 1882. The adoption of European dress was criticized during the final decades of the nineteenth century for many reasons, including nationalistic objections, apparent health hazards (it was considered to be too tight and inappropriate for Egyptian weather), and also the lack of modesty in women’s clothing.19 At the turn of the century, a criticism warning of potential financial burdens was also advanced. Articles in popular magazines recommended young Egyptians not to imitate European styles under the pretence of ‘being modern and civilised’, lest they ended up bankrupt.20

18

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20

‘The last indigenous elements to disappear are the ones most heavily invested with social or symbolic importance’, and referred to ‘head gear, or garments worn in a ritual context’ as examples. The main reference here was Beth Baron, ‘Unveiling in Early TwentiethCentury Egypt: Practical and Symbolic Considerations’, Middle Eastern Studies, 25/3 (1989), 370–86; also Mona L. Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education, and National Identity, 1863– 1922 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 11–95. Russell, New Egyptian Woman, 39; Wilson Chacko Jacob, ‘The Turban, the Tarbush, and the Top Hat: Masculinity, Modernity, and National Identity in Interwar Egypt’, Al-Raida, 21/104–5 (2004), 25. Jacob, ‘Turban, Tarbush, Top Hat’, 26.

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While the popular European style for Egyptian men consisted of sack suits with a tarbush (a local hat made of red felt), women’s styles were not as well known or frequently encountered, probably because their clothing was often covered by veils outside of the home. There were different names and styles for these coverings: khabara and milaya were wraps for the head and body, and the burqu‘ and niqab were coverings for the face. The consistent practice of covering Europeanized dresses with veils was documented in the accounts of foreign visitors.21 There was some variation in the extent to which European styles were adopted, and there were also differences in the thickness of the veils. Some Christian and Jewish women, who may have had more contact with foreigners than ordinary Muslims, began to wear lighter coverings at the end of the nineteenth century.22 The most consistent use of the veil was observed among upper-class women. Elizabeth Cooper, who visited Egypt in the early 1910s, wrote that ‘the lady of Egypt’, who dressed ‘much like a French woman of the same social standing’ at home, was covered with a black dress and white face veil when she went out, and hidden in a carriage or motorcar. Thus, these women were rarely seen.23 The first strong voice advocating unveiling came from Qasim Amin (1863–1908), a Turkish-Egyptian member of the elite who had studied law in France in the 1890s. He had contacts both with the most covered women of the Egyptian upper class and with those wearing no veil during his time in France. In his book, Liberation of Women, published in 1899, he called for a review of the Egyptian practice of veiling, the lack of female education, and the family laws that were oppressive towards women. Amin insisted that he did not advocate the complete abandonment of veils, but instead proposed a re-examination of Islamic law to determine their proper use. In a chapter titled ‘Women’s Veil’ (Hijā b al-Nisā ’) he wrote: ˙ My observations on this topic also indicate that Westerners have gone too far in the exposure of their women so that it is difficult for

21 22 23

Cf. Baron, ‘Unveiling in Egypt’; Russell, New Egyptian Woman, 15–18. Baron, ‘Unveiling in Egypt’, 379. Elizabeth Cooper, The Women of Egypt (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers, 1914), 129.

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hissako anjo, emi goto, and miki sugiura a Western woman to guard herself from sensuous desires and unacceptable shameful feelings. We, on the other hand, have gone to extremes in veiling our women and prohibiting them from appearing unveiled before men, to such an extent that we turn women into objects or goods we own. We have deprived them of the mental and cultural advantages that are their natural due as human beings. The legal veil (al-hijā b al-shar’ı̄ ), however, is ˙ somewhere between these two extremes.24

As seen above, Amin chose the term hijab (al-hijāb), an Arabic noun meaning ‘a screen to avoid another’s gaze’ or ‘a partition to divide two parties’ to refer to women’s coverings. Hijab appears several times in the Qur’ā n, and two of these uses are related to women: once to refer to a screen separating Mary (mother of the Prophet Isa, or Jesus) from others; and once to refer to the separation of the wives of the Prophet Muhammad from male visitors (19:17 and 33:53, respectively). Although hijab had been used by both Muslims and non-Muslims to indicate women’s coverings, Amin developed his discussion exclusively in the context of Islamic discourses to criticize the contemporary use of the term. According to Amin, hijab connoted four meanings related to women: covering of hair and breasts; covering of face and hands; confinement at home; and prohibition of interaction with nonrelated men. Amin examined some religious sources (such as the Qur’ā n, traditions of the Prophet, and books of Islamic law) to conclude that only the first meaning – the covering of hair and breasts – was religiously binding in Islam. The others were local customs, which were, in his opinion, harmful for women and society; he believed that they should be abandoned. According to Amin, face veils and seclusion could prevent women from gaining access to opportunities for education, experiencing other aspects of life, and developing good health and a sound mind. Further, since women would be mothers of the next generation, improving their status would have an uplifting effect on wider society.25 24

25

Qā sim Amı̄ n, al-A‘mā l al-Kā mila, ed. Muhammad ‘Imā ra (Cairo and Beirut: ˙ Liberation of Women/The New Dā r al-Shuru¯q, 1989), 350; Qasim Amin, The Woman, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1992), 35–6. Amı̄ n, al-A‘mā l al-Kā mila, 352–9; Amin, ‘Liberation of Women’, 37–45.

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Although Amin emphasized that his intention was not to negate Islamic tradition, nor to imitate foreign customs, his writings were criticized on these grounds. Many responses to his work were published. Some cited Islamic sources and insisted on the need for strict hijab practices, or the complete covering and seclusion of women. One of these books was written by Muhammad Tal‘at Harb (1867–1941), who was from a lower-middle-class family and, like Amin, had been educated in law. He insisted on the urgent need for complete observation of the hijab, specifically because such practices had recently been relaxed due to the increased opportunities for Egyptians to interact with foreigners. At the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, women began to join the discussion through writings in newspapers and journals. Malak Hifni Nasif (1886–1918), one of the first women from a middle-class family to pursue higher education, published an article titled ‘Veiling and Unveiling’ (Hijā b wa al-Sufu¯r).26 Like ˙ Harb, Nasif maintained that there was a need for the hijab, but not because it was indispensable to Islamic religion or Egyptian society. Instead, she claimed society was not yet ready for its removal. Malak referred to the way women were constantly being molested on the street, shamed by impudent words, and gazed at by men. For her, whether to veil or unveil was a woman’s choice; only when the right time came, should they make judgements according to their own interests and that of the nation.27 Despite these voices objecting to unveiling, the abandonment of seclusion along with the lightening or discarding of some coverings for the face and body gradually proliferated among Egyptian women. Perhaps most remarkable, besides the removal of veils, was the adoption of light veils for the face and body, which was probably influenced by the latest fashion in Istanbul. Thus, new styles of veiling appeared even during the process of unveiling.28 26

27 28

Bā hitha al-Bā dı̄ ya (Malak Hifnı̄ Nā sif), Al-Nisā ’īyā t: Majmu¯‘a Maqā lā t ˙ ˙ al-Misrı̄ ya (Cairo: Al-Mu’assasa alNushirat fı̄ al-Jarı̄ da fı̄ Mawd˙ u¯‘ al-Mar’a ˙ ˙ Mar’a wa al-Dhā kira, 2012), 60–5. Ibid., 64. For changes in women’s outer garments in Egypt and Ottoman Istanbul, see Fatma Koç and Emine Koca, ‘The Westernization Process in Ottoman Women’s Garments: 18th Century~20th Century’, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 13/4 (2007), 57–84; and Baron, ‘Unveiling in Egypt’.

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For most covered upper-class women, ‘the ladies’ demonstration’ in March 1919 was a historical moment. Led by Huda Shaarawi (1879–1947), an Egyptian elite woman who strived for national and women’s causes, hundreds of women wearing black robes, black head-covers, and white face veils marched to the capital to protest against British occupation. For upper-class women, the mere act of coming out into public, even with all the coverings, was a step forward in the process of unveiling (Figure 32.1).29

Figure 32.1 Egyptian women participating in one of the marches during April 1919, wearing black robes, black head-covers, and white face veils. Getty Images.

29

On the ‘the ladies’ demonstration’ and Shaarawi’s role in it, see Huda Shaarawi, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, trans. Margot Badran (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998); and Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 107–34.

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In May 1923, Shaarawi and two others from the Egyptian Feminist Union attended a congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Rome. They wore European-style dresses while in Rome, and upon their return, they thought about removing their face covers. According to Shaarawi’s biography, she was worried about what impact this ‘revolutionary step’ would have on her daughter’s social life. She discussed the idea with her son-inlaw; with his approval, Shaarawi publicly took off her white face cover at Cairo station (Figure 32.2).30 This narrative of unveiling indicates that it took two decades for upper-class Egyptian women, who were one of the most Europeanized groups in terms of dress, to abandon a part of the traditional covering.

Figure 32.2 Huda Shaarawi (centre), Saiza Nabrawi (right), and Nabawiya Musa (left) lifting face veils in Roma in 1923. Nabawiya Musa was among the first female Muslims who took off their face veils around 1910. Bryn Mawr Special Collections.

30

Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi, Casting off the Veil: The Life of Huda Shaarawi Egypt’s First Feminist (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 97–8.

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In this context, the discussions and practices surrounding veiling and unveiling in Egypt illuminate the complexity of abandonment occurring alongside the adoption of European-style dress. These developments showcase that Egyptians sought to create their own meanings through their clothing styles. This creative process of abandoning the veil seemed to have ended in the following decades, partly because nationwide unveiling was encouraged in post-Ottoman Turkey during the 1920s, and European-style fashion, or partial adoptions of its designs and shapes added to traditional styles, had spread among all Egyptian classes, who looked to both Europe and Turkey for inspiration. By the time that Egypt celebrated its complete independence in 1952, veiling was rarely observed or even discussed. However, a new status quo regarding veiling was not yet set. Towards the end of the 1960s, veiling and unveiling became an issue once again. At that time, some aspects of the earlier discussions over the hijab were revived.

the context of conformity: white-collar workers buying western clothing in japan, c . 1910s–1930s In Japan, it was not until the 1950s that the majority of people wore yo¯fuku (Western clothing) on a daily basis.31 However, among male white-collar workers, wearing Western clothing as business attire became standard – more or less a uniform – as early as the 1910s. The history of the adoption of Western clothing among Japanese men has been mainly discussed with regard to the clothing reforms led by the Meiji government during the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries; the later history has not yet been fully articulated.32 As Naoko Oyama argues, the fact that government officials and people who considered themselves progressive started 31

32

This section uses the term ‘Western clothing’ rather than ‘European-style clothing’ because the Japanese referred to both Europe and the United States as the West as they gradually became used to the new clothing in the second half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. In addition, the character 洋 (yo¯) originally meant ‘ocean’, and thus, this meaning can be extended to imply ‘West’, which vaguely refers to Europe and the United States. Toby Slade, Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 2009); Yoshinori Osakabe, Yo¯fuku, sanpatsu and datto¯: Fukusei no meiji ishin [Western Clothing, Haircuts and the Detachment of Swords: The Meiji

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wearing Western clothing, under the influence of the dress reform, certainly marked the starting point of the adoption of Western clothing as Japanese white-collar workers’ business attire.33 However, an explanation of the starting point does not explain its subsequent broad acceptance. This section will first demonstrate that the pressure to conform and the desire to keep up appearances functioned as factors encouraging white-collar male workers to wear Western clothing in the 1910s and 1920s. Second, it will clarify that white-collar workers had begun to adopt global fashion trends under these circumstances by the early 1930s. According to Hiroshi Minami, the percentage of so-called whitecollar workers (e.g. clerical employees, salesmen, public servants, and teachers), among Japan’s total population grew from 4 per cent in 1915 to 12 per cent in 1925.34 They had typically completed secondary or higher education and lived on a fixed monthly salary. They were considered ‘a new middle class’ at the time because of their entirely different life course and lifestyle compared to artisans, craftsmen, and labourers.35 Wearing Western clothing as business attire was one of the practices of this new middle class; although they generally changed into a kimono at home. Kafu¯ Nagai, an author, playwright, and essayist, described the extent of Western clothing near Hibiya and Ginza, central areas in Tokyo, in the summer of 1916: We see a sort of uniform that is not a uniform. In banks, as if by common consent, workers, including presidents, directors, and

33

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Restoration in Clothing Systems] (Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 2010); Yoshinori Osakabe, ‘Dressing up during the Meiji Restoration: A Perspective on Fukusei’, in Kyunghee Pyun and Aida Yuen Wong (eds.), Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 23–45. Naoko Oyama, Furokku ko¯to to haori hakama: Reiso¯ kihan no keisei to kindai nihon [Frock Coat and Haori Hakama: The Formation of Formal Dress Code and Modern Japan] (Tokyo: Keiso¯shobo¯, 2016). Although there are a few mentions of men’s costume between the 1910s and 1930s in Oyama’s study, they are almost completely limited to what pertains to the later governmental clothing reform. Hiroshi Minami and Shakaishinri Kenkyu¯jo (Institute of Social Psychological Research), Taisho¯ bunka [Taisho¯ Cultures] (Tokyo: Keiso¯ Shobo¯, 1965), 184. Louise Young, ‘Marketing the Modern: Department Stores, Consumer Culture, and the New Middle Class in Interwar Japan’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 55 (1999), 52–70.

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hissako anjo, emi goto, and miki sugiura temporary employees who receive small salaries, all wear Western clothing with a white high collar while fanning themselves. It is the same among insurance sales agents, journalists, and advertising workers.36

The expression ‘a sort of uniform that is not a uniform’ suggests that conformity was required of white-collar workers, and this was expressed by wearing Western clothing at work. In a 1927 essay, Kyoshi Takahama, a haiku poet and founder of the haiku magazine Hototogisu (A Little Cuckoo), reflected on his experience. In 1923, when he set up the magazine’s publishing office in the Marunouchi Building, a high-rise office building in central Tokyo, he found that he was the only man who wore kimono in the building. He felt ashamed, noting: ‘There were very few people wearing a kimono. In fact, there were hardly any. I felt somewhat out of place at first.’37 From this description, we can infer the pressure to conform and wear Western clothing. Indeed, this pressure was felt keenly even by a poet like Takahama, for whom it would not have been common to wear Western apparel. It is necessary to clarify which items of Western clothing were worn by white-collar male workers. They included a sack coat, a waistcoat, trousers, a shirt, a tie, socks, a hat, and shoes. Although frock coats were widely worn from the 1870s to the 1900s, especially by government officials, they were replaced by sack coats during the 1910s and 1920s.38 The sack coat was called sebiro in Japanese. According to one hypothesis, this word was used because it sounded similar to ‘Savile Row’, the London street well known for its bespoke men’s tailoring. In 1925, Wajiro¯ Kon, 36

37

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Kafu¯ Nagai, ‘Yo¯fuku ron’ [Essay on Western Clothing], Bunmei [Civilization], 1/5 (1916), 58. Reprinted in Fujio Noguchi (ed.), Kafu¯ zuihitsushu¯: Ge [Kafu’s Collection of Essays: The Second Volume] (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 1986), 275. Kyoshi Takahama, ‘Marunouchi’, To¯kyo¯ Nichinichi Shinbun: Yu¯kan [Tokyo Nichinichi Evening Newspaper], 15 March 1927, 1. Reprinted in Ko¯dansha Bungeibunko [Kodansha Literary Novel] (ed.), Dai to¯kyo¯ hanjyo¯ ki: Yamanote hen [A Contemporary History of the Thriving Great Tokyo: Yamanote] (Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 2013), 99. It seems that morning suits were replacing frock coats for formal occasions in the latter half of the 1920s. See Kiyoshi Tsuji, Yo¯fuku ten no keiei tora no maki [The Bible of the Western Clothing Business] (Osaka: Yo¯fukutsu¯shinsha, 1926), 126, 130–1.

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a folklorist, conducted a survey on social status among pedestrians in the downtown wards of Honjo and Fukagawa in Tokyo. He categorized men wearing sack suits as white-collar workers and emphasized that their attire was utterly different from that of artisans, craftsmen, and labourers, who did not wear those garments.39 Such white-collar workers can be seen on their way home in the 15 May 1929 issue of Asahigurafu (Figure 32.3). Importantly, wearing Western clothing was expensive, often exceeding the affordable clothing budget within the monthly salary of a junior office worker. As inflation soared, living expenses in the late 1910s rose considerably, and the misery of white-collar workers with regard to the high price of Western clothing became a social issue; they were referred to as yo¯fuku saimin (poor men in Western clothing). These words connoted poverty even though they kept up appearances by wearing Western styles.40 According to Toshiro¯ Ubukata’s 1919 article, the phrase was first used selfderisively by lower-level white-collar staff, and later became buzzwords.41 The situation worsened after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. An article published in January 1924 in the Asahi Shinbun newspaper calculated that the total average annual cost of buying men’s Western clothing, including a shirt, collar, tie, and shoes, was 234.5 yen, while the average monthly salary of male white-collar workers who had graduated from a private university was 50–70 yen and that of teachers of university preparatory courses (who were highly paid workers) was 87.52 yen.42 The cost was thus a heavy burden on low-level professional workers even if 39

40

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According to Kon’s survey, artisans, craftsmen, and labourers often wore a Western shirt under a happi and a hanten – traditional Japanese work jackets. Wajiro¯ Kon, ‘Honjo fukagawa hinmin kutsu fukin fu¯zoku saishu¯’ [A Collection of Customs around the Slums in Honjo and Fukagawa], Fujin ko¯ron [Women’s Public Opinion], December 1925, 18. Reprinted in Wajiro¯ Kon, Ko¯gen gaku nyu¯mon [Introduction to Modernology] (Tokyo: Chikumashobo¯, 1987), 158, 162–8. Toshiro¯ Ubukata, ‘Yo¯fuku saimin’ [Poor Men in Western Clothing], So¯zo¯ [Creation], June 1919, 113. Ibid., 112–13. ‘Yo¯fuku shincho¯ no mitsumori’ [The Cost of Ordering New Western Clothing], Asahi Shinbun [Asahi Newspaper], 30 January 1924, 10; ‘Tsutomenin no so¯ba’ [The Average Salary for Salaried Workers], Asahi Shinbun, 11 April 1924, 7; ‘Koishikawa ku no kyo¯in ho¯kyu¯’ [Salaries for Teachers in Koishikawa District], Asahi Shinbun, 15 August 1924, 6.

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Figure 32.3 White-collar workers on their way home, Japan, 1929. The building in the background bears a strong similarity to railway stations in Tokyo like those partially extant today near Shinbashi, Yu¯rakucho¯, and Kanda stations. Asahigurafu, 15 May 1929, p. 11.

they did not purchase a full set every year. There are detailed descriptions of their hardship in Hajime Maeda’s 1928 book, Sarariman Monogatari (The Salaried Worker’s Story). At the beginning of the book, he introduced poor men in Western clothing as koshiben, referring to white-collar workers who received a monthly salary but carried a packed lunch around their waists every day to avoid spending money eating out.43 He described a man looking for Western clothing in a second-hand market in Yanagihara or Hikagecho¯ in Tokyo: After heated price negotiation, his figure carrying a bundle of Western clothes disappears into the crowd . . . When he shows his seemingly new Western clothing to his colleagues the next day, he will finally be able to think of himself as a decent person . . . It is koshiben’s inexpressible sadness that they are obligated to dress up to keep up with the Joneses even if they spent what little money they had on a ‘kubitsuri.’ Because of this, they cannot even buy

43

Hajime Maeda, Sarariman monogatari [The Salaried Worker’s Story] (Tokyo: To¯yo¯keizai Shuppanbu, 1928), 1.

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the global politics of european-style dress a new juban (undershirt for kimono) for their wives and children. Who knows this sadness?44

We need to keep in mind that these descriptions contained some exaggeration. Actually, a variety of second-hand clothes was available, including items that looked brand new,45 and buying them was one of the most important means of obtaining Western clothing more cheaply.46 However, they would have certainly faced a dilemma between using their meagre earnings sparingly or spending them on Western clothing to maintain their dignity. If ‘poor men in Western clothing’ stopped wearing Western fashions altogether, they might have escaped their poverty. Nevertheless, most seem to have chosen to dress neatly in a three-piece suit. For white-collar workers, wearing Western clothing was closely connected with maintaining appearances and avoiding embarrassment resulting from non-conformity. Thus, conformity drove them to wear Western clothing despite the practical reasons not to (Figures 32.4 and 32.5). On the other hand, we should not overlook the fact that, by the early 1930s, a consumer culture of abundance was expanding before the eyes of white-collar workers. While low-level professional workers’ hardships became a social issue, by the 1920s, department stores – which had previously focused on the wealthy – chose white-collar workers and their families as targets and began to sell lower-priced goods such as shirts and shoes intended for ¯ oka argue, department them.47 As Nobuyoshi Tasaki and Satoshi O stores began to direct their attentions to office workers because 44

45 46

47

Ibid., 44–5. The term ‘kubitsuri’ had a dual meaning: ‘suicide by hanging’ and second-hand clothing in the markets, thought to look like hanged bodies. Tsuji, Yo¯fuku ten no keiei tora no maki, 40–5. Additionally, ready-made suits seem to have become popular by the 1930s. In an article published in the April 1931 issue of Kingu [King], Einosuke Hachiya, Western clothing section manager of the Mitsukoshi Department Store, said that ready-made suits accounted for 55 per cent of all sales of men’s suits while bespoke suits accounted for 45 percent. ‘Yo¯fuku hyappan monoshiri mondo¯’ [Questions and Answers: All about Western Clothing], Kingu, April 1931, 301–2. ¯ oka, ‘Sho¯hishakai no tenkai to hyakkaten’ Nobuyoshi Tasaki and Satoshi O [Consumer Society and Department Stores], in Taketoshi Yamamoto and Tamotsu Nishizawa (eds.), Hyakkaten no bunka shi: Nihon no sho¯hi shakai

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Figure 32.4 ‘The Perfect Figure’. The figure illustrates the essential items required to become a ‘perfect’ gentleman. Shinseinen (New Young Men), Japan, February 1930, p. 205.

they ‘desire to consume more than necessary in order to pursue and maintain the status of belonging to the middle class’.48 Consequently, they had more choices when they shopped. Furthermore, tailor shops began to manufacture and sell highquality ready-made suits at a lower price in order to respond to

48

[Cultural History of Department Stores: Consumer Society in Japan] (Tokyo: Sekaisiso¯sha, 1999), 34–7. Ibid., 37.

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Figure 32.5 A single-breasted sack suit and a double-breasted sack suit ‘in style’. Shinseinen (New Young Men), March 1930, p. 211.

the needs of these men.49 Kiyoshi Tsuji, who operated a tailor shop in Kyoto, emphasized the necessity of providing affordable high-quality suits to low-level white-collar workers in his 1926 book, and his business seems to have dealt in both bespoke and ready-made garments.50 In Tokyo, the Manzaki tailor shop had started by 1924.51 49

50 51

Although ready-made Western clothes already existed in the 1910s, they were known to be cheap and poor-quality goods. See Kenzo¯ Ikeda, ‘Yori yasuki fuku wo’ [We Need Cheaper Clothes], in Fukuso¯ Bunka Kenkyu¯kai (Clothing Culture Society) (ed.), Kore kara no fukuso¯ wa do¯ subeki ka [How Should We Do Clothing of the Future?] (Tokyo: Bunkado¯ Shuppanbu, 1922), 67–71. See also Tsuji, Yo¯fuku ten no keiei tora no maki, 53–4. Tsuji, Yo¯fuku ten no keiei tora no maki, 55–9, 273–8, 419, 421. Advertisement for the Manzaki tailor shop, Asahi Shinbun: Yu¯kan [Asahi Evening Newspaper], 11 October 1924, 1.

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In the latter half of the 1920s and the early half of the 1930s, magazines and newspapers detailed the latest fashion trends. For example, Shinseinen (New Young Men), the leading detective novel and urban lifestyles magazine,52 started a series in January 1929 titled ‘Vanichı̄ Feia’, which sounded much like ‘Vanity Fair’.53 The magazine often published articles on making ends meet with a monthly salary.54 The prevalence of these articles suggests that subscribers were mainly young white-collar workers, including those who could not afford to buy what they wanted. While advising them on how to survive hardship and unemployment, the magazine also presented the latest fashion trends and related items (Figures 32.4 and 32.5). It included detailed information on fashion trends: square shoulders, peaked lapels, round-hem sack coats, and trousers with one- to one-and-half-inch-wide cuffs which were depicted as ‘in style’ in the March 1930 issue.55 The same issue advertised watches and lighters from high-end makers such as Longines (Switzerland), Movado (Switzerland), Dunhill (United Kingdom), and Douglas (United States).56 Subscribers reading such frequently used phrases as ‘You had better do this (or else . . .)’, ‘You should’, and ‘You must not’ would have yearned to make these items part of their attire even if they could not actually afford such goods. These items would have become a tool to differentiate oneself, as not everyone could easily obtain them. Moreover, it is notable that this serialized feature described American style as flashy and suitable for young men, in contrast to the British conservative style.57 Thus, white-collar workers were 52

53

54

55 56 57

Shinseinen Kenkyu¯kai (Shinseinen Society) (ed.), Shinseinen tokuhon: Sho¯wa gurafitı̄ [Textbook of New Young Men: Showa Graffiti] (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1988), 36–8. After January 1930, it continued under the new title ‘Voganvogu’, which represented the sound of the French phrase ‘Vogue en Vogue’, until December 1938. ‘Kindai binbo¯ senjutsu’ [Modern Strategy against Poverty], Shinseinen [New Young Men], September 1929, 72–92; ‘Modan daigaku: Kindai yarikuri no maki’ [Modern Lessons: Modern Ways to Make Ends Meet], Shinseinen, December 1929, 130–48; ‘Sitsugyo¯ ekkusu wai zetto’ [Unemployment A to Z], Shinseinen, September 1930, 145. ‘Voganvogu’ [Vogue en Vogue], Shinseinen, March 1930, 128–31. Ibid., 211–13. ‘Voganvogu’ [Vogue en Vogue], Shinseinen, January 1930 (new year enlarged special issue), 282–3; ‘Voganvogu’, Shinseinen, July 1930, 202.

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the global politics of european-style dress

exposed to new dynamics that urged them to enjoy a material abundance directly connected to global fashion trends that were imported from America and partially replaced European influence. By the 1930s, white-collar workers had more consumption choices, including second-hand goods, low-priced new goods, and high-quality ready-made goods, while non-essential goods such as high-end watches and trendy suits began to be introduced. It is important to emphasize that this new situation in the early 1930s did not arise out of nothing; it emerged at a time when consumption was motivated by the pressure to conform and the desire to keep up appearances in the 1910s and 1920s.

the context of copying: buying and selling japanese shirts in east africa, 1920s–1930s During the 1900s–1930s, clothing diffused inland in East Africa (Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar, and Tanganyika) from coastal areas, with advancing speed.58 However, this did not necessarily promote European-style dress. Rather, in this period, Europeanization of dress could be said to have slowed down compared to the previous phase (1840–1900), when European intervention strengthened alongside the development of Arabic and Muslim governance. The processes of colonization, intensive merchandising of textiles, Christian missionaries’ activities, and Madagascar’s Europeanization policy all facilitated the adoption of European-style dress.59 Ironically, these waves of adoption were brought partially to a halt with the start of formal colonization around 1900, when the British colonial government discouraged East Africans from dressing in a European style, as the 58

59

Gaimusho¯ tu¯sho¯kyoku [Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) Department for Trade], Eiryo¯ higashi afurika jijo¯ [Consular Report 1924: State of Affairs in British East Africa] (Tokyo: MOFA, 1924), 109; Gaimusho chosabu, Higashi afurika jijo [Consular Report 1934: State of Affairs in East Africa] (Tokyo: MOFA, November 1934), 63, 111; see also Ikai Shirakawa, Jicchi to¯sa Higashi-Afurika no tabi [Fieldwork: Journey to East Africa] (Tokyo: Hakubun-kan, 1928), 217. Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001); Sarah Fee, ‘The King’s New Clothing: Re-dressing the Body Politic in Madagascar, c. 1815–1861’, in Lemire and Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies, 153–81.

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colonizers wanted to distinguish themselves from locals. This policy helped kanzu, the long Arabic tunic-style shirts and kanga, a wrap dress made of printed imported cotton cloth, spread further in coastal urban areas.60 They were worn initially by Swahili Muslims and Arabs, but emancipated slaves also began to wear them, making kanzu not necessarily limited to Muslims.61 Some non-Muslims in interior societies also embraced the kanzu before the colonial era. However, these urban wares, particularly kanga and Arabic kofia-styled hats, were not worn by those living in inland rural areas.62 These rural people wore a style that contemporaries described as ‘neither Swahili nor European’. The ambiguous ‘neither Swahili nor European’ style is visible in the image of a crowd at Nairobi’s main train station in the mid1920s (Figure 32.6). People dressed in full European style are easily distinguishable, as are those in Swahili style, with kanzu long shirts and tall dark-coloured tarbush/fez-styled caps. We also see on the left a man clothed in a short-sleeved knitted cotton t-shirt and shorts, and another man in a similar pair of trousers with a longsleeved shirt; both are possibly bare-footed. Contemporaries distinguished this ‘shirt and short trousers’ style from European style, which involved being fully dressed from top to toe with hats, jackets, and shoes.63 Figure 32.7 shows that this local ‘shirt and short trousers’ style was remarkably different from the ‘Safari’ Europeanstyle shirts and half-trousers worn by the British. White shirts and short trousers both became later iconic dress worn at community celebrations.64 60

61

62

63 64

For the invention of kanga, see MacKenzie Moon Ryan, ‘A Decade of Design: The Global Invention of the Kanga, 1876–1886’, Textile History, 48/1 (2017), 101–32; MacKenzie Moon Ryan, ‘Converging Trades and New Technologies: The Emergence of Kanga Textiles on the Swahili Coast in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Machado et al. (eds.), Textile Trades, 253–86. Laura Fair, ‘Dressing up: Clothing, Class and Gender in Post-Abolition Zanzibar’, Journal of African History, 39/1 (1998), 63–94. As is mentioned later, kanzu were relatively popular and spread to the rural areas. Nakagawa Hikoharu, ‘Higashi afrika ni tsuite’ [About East Africa], in Tokyo yushutsu kyo¯kai, Shiryoso¯sho, 13 (1938), 8. Ibid. Short trousers in ‘Safari suits’ and white simple shirts gained later iconic status becoming part of the coat of arms of the independent nation, or costumes of dancing rituals. See Karen Tranberg Hansen, ‘Global Fashion Encounters and Africa: Affective Materialities in Zambia’, in Lemire and

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Figure 32.6 Crowd at Nairobi station taken by a member of the Japanese consulate in 1926. From Gaimusho¯ Tsu¯sho¯-kyoku, Eiryo¯ higashi Afurika jijo¯ [Consular Report 1928, State of Affairs in British East Africa] (Tokyo: MOFA, 1928), Appendix.

Figure 32.7 Railway station Nairobi, British East Africa, c. 1910–20s. Postcard from unknown publisher, www.oldeastafricapostcards.com/? page_id=2352.

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The starting point of this highly popularized ‘neither Swahili nor European’ style could be traced to the importation of the coarse unbleached cotton shirting cloth, merekani. It was initially supplied by companies from the United States, and became the most popular cloth by the end of the 1840s in East Africa.65 In the 1920s, it was used for body wraps, waist wraps (shuka), low-quality kanzu shirts, and short- and long-sleeved shirts and trousers, all of which, even the kanzu shirt, belonged to the ‘neither Swahili nor European’ style.66 Merekani sellers shifted from the United States to Britain and India. However, during the 1920s–30s, Japan rapidly became the dominant supplier of merekani cloth, as well as printed cotton cloth and shirts. According to Mombasa port trade statistics, in 1920, Japan had a less than 6 per cent share of unbleached cotton cloth sales, but in 1923 it had a 55 per cent share.67 During 1925–7, Japan’s official share of unbleached cotton cloth sales reached over 60 per cent in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika, and this increased to 74 per cent in 1931.68 Japan’s share of printed textiles grew simultaneously from less than 1 per cent in the mid-1920s to 77.5 per cent in 1931, including those for urban kanga.69 Alongside Japan’s rapid success in the urban East African markets, these reports unanimously noted Japan’s clear intention to target people who had begun to buy clothes in rural areas: Japanese-made merekani cloth was appreciated by those living in ‘remote areas distant

65

66 67

68

69

Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies, 289–305; Terence O. Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890–1970: The Beni Ngoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Jeremy Prestholdt, ‘The Ends of the Indian Ocean: Notes on Boundaries and Affinities across Time’, in Smriti Srinivas, Bettina Ng’weno, and Neelima Jeychandran (eds.), Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2020), 25–41. Gaimusho¯ Tsu¯sho¯-kyoku, Consular Report 1924, 135. Ibid., 141. Apart from these, masses of Japanese-made unbleached cottons were imported via India. Gaimusho¯ Tsu¯sho¯-kyoku, Consular Report, 1928, 31. Gaimusho¯ Tsu¯sho¯-kyoku, Eiryo¯ higashi Afurika jijo¯ [Consular Report 1928, State of Affairs in British East Africa] (Tokyo: MOFA, 1928), 161–5, 337–46. Gaimusho¯ Tsu¯sho¯-kyoku, Eiryo¯ higashi afurika no nishu keniya, Uganda no boeki Kinjo [Consular Report 1932, State of Affairs of Kenya and Uganda, two Regions of British East Africa] (Tokyo: MOFA, 1932), 63–4.

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Figure 32.8 Market scene at Fort Portal, Uganda, in 1936. From G. Eric and Edith Matson, ‘Uganda. From Hoima to Fort Portal. Types in the native market’. Nitrate negatives, 4 × 5 inches, 1936. Matson Photo Service (photographer). Photograph Collections, Library of Congress, Washington, DC: LC-DIG-matpc-17486.

from the trading ports’ and ‘in the cold highland villages with banana fields’.70 In Figure 32.8, we see shirts and wraps made of unbleached, stripe-printed cotton cloth worn by inland rural people at the market of Fort Portal, located in Western Uganda near the border with Belgian Congo, in the 1930s. Japanese-made merekani had two major material differences from preceding products: it was thicker and whiter. The Japanese were particularly inclined to sell heavier 8–10 pound merekani at the Mombasa market in 1926, while American merekani concentrated on the 5–5.5 pound range (see Table 32.1).71 Japanese merekani were by no means the cheap-

70 71

Gaimusho¯ Tsu¯sho¯-kyoku, Consular Report, 1924, 138. Nihon Sho¯ko¯ Kaigisho [Japanese Chamber of Commerce JCC] (ed.), Ryosho¯ dainihan ho¯kokusho [Report of the Second Group of Travelling Merchants] (Tokyo: JCC, 1929), 92–102.

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est in price compared to products from the United States or India, but the durable cloth met the demands of inland areas, where people favoured single-layer outerwear shirts and were durability conscious, as the rural price was higher due to extra transport costs, and people could not afford to buy many items.72 Another new feature of Japan-produced merekani that was favoured inland was that the unbleached cloth became whiter as one washed it, a preference which Japanese reports determined as ‘local aesthetics’. But this was most probably in fact the reflection of a heightened colonial and commercial campaign to show well-washed white shirts as signs of modernity or well-preserved domesticity.73 Hence, it can be inferred that the popularity of Japanese-made merekani resulted from certain qualities competitors’ products lacked. At the same time, Japan became the top supplier of knitted and cotton fabric shirts as well as rubber shoes. Japan’s share of hosiery shirts was 64 per cent in Tanganyika in the mid-1920s but was 93 per cent by 1931.74 Zanzibar’s trade record from 1926–7 shows that imports of Japanese knitwear had tripled in a year; the majority were transported to Tanganyika.75 Plain knit t-shirts of various styles were a new Japanese specialism responding to East African demand. British stocks of these items rapidly decreased. As early as the 1870s, Japan had begun an import-substitution initiative with cotton knitwear, exporting these goods to China, India, and the Philippines. When Japan began losing these principal markets in the 1920s, because locally owned hosiery industries were growing, Japanese companies targeted Africa as a replacement market. By the end of the 1920s, East Africa became Japan’s main market for cotton knitwear and local demand concentrated on shirts; this demand was triggered by rural inland areas in present-day Tanganyika and Uganda rather than coastal urban sites.76 72 73

74 76

Ibid.,109 and 119. Ibid., 109. For contemporary campaigns for washing, see Timothy Burke, ‘“Sunlight Soap Has Changed My Life”: Hygiene, Commodification, and the Body in Colonial Zimbabwe’, in Hildi Hendrickson (ed.), Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 189–212. Gaimusho¯ Tsu¯sho¯-kyoku, Consular Report, 1928, 75–9. 75 Ibid., 418. Ibid., 346.

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the global politics of european-style dress Table 32.1

The retail price of merekani at Mombasa Bazaar in latter half of the 1920s

Label

Producing countries

Size

Price (shilling) per Weight 30 yards at (pounds) Mombasa Bazaar

Merekani

US

32 inch × 30 yard

5–5.5

11s–12s/30 yard

Merekani camthi

India

32 inch × 30 yard

6

10.75s/30 yard

Merekani

Japan

36 inch × 30 yard

8–10

15s–17s/30 yard

Source: Nihon Sho¯ko¯ Kaigisho [Japanese Chamber of Commerce JCC] (ed.), Ryosho¯ dainihan ho¯kokusho (Report of the second group of Travelling Merchants) (Tokyo: JCC, 1929), 92–102.

Importantly, Tanzanians and Ugandans did not regard knitted t-shirts as undergarments but wore them as outerwear. The Japanese Consular Report of 1928 noted, ‘As the [inland] highland area of Tanganyika is cool, native Tanzanians adore the touch and feel of [knitted] hosiery [shirts] and the item is sold everywhere.’77 These goods continued to sell despite the Great Depression, an indication of local commitment to this fashion. In 1939, Japan exported around 7.8 million yen’s worth of shirts to Africa, of which 5 million yen were knitwear t-shirts. East Africa comprised more than one-third of the share.78 Japan had become the largest supplier of clothing to the entirety of Africa, driven largely by this powerful East African demand. To what extent did Japanese sellers consider themselves to be delivering cheaper copies of products previously sold by the British or Americans? Cheapness was undoubtedly the essence of local attraction to Japanese products.79 It was reported that a local 77 78

79

Ibid., 346. ‘Nihon bo¯eki shinko¯ kyo¯kai’ [Association of Promotion of Trade], in Afurika muke honpo¯ zakka yushutsu no bunseki [Japan’s Export of Miscellaneous Goods to Africa] (Tokyo: Nihon bo¯eki shinko¯ kyo¯kai, 1941), 21, 37–9. An article in the East African Standard in 1932 stated that the British, who sold in FOB (importers paying freight and insurance fees) were unable to compete with the Japanese, who sold in CIF (exporters paying freight and insurance fees). Because of this difference, one pound of Japanese ready-made shirts was sold at 54 shillings (4 shillings 50 cents per item), whereas Londonor Manchester-made shirts could not be sold for less than 86–90 shillings;

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jubilantly told the Japanese Consul in Mombasa in the early 1930s that the cheapness of Japanese products allowed them to buy two garments instead of one and to consider buying rubber shoes as well – Japanese shoes were 12–50 per cent cheaper in price than British ones.80 Nevertheless, contemporary reports demonstrate a shared notion that the Japanese were providing something new, responding directly to the intense demand and desires of locals, rather than merely providing cheaper copies of existing products.81 A 1941 report acknowledged East Africans’ attraction to Japanese products, and verified that Japanese branding had been established by then.82 Importantly, however, it was East Africans’ demand and tastes that shaped the design and construction of these products.83 Multiple Japanese reports noted East Africans’ zeal for Japanesemade clothing, ‘pouring 100 percent of their desire, thus income, into purchases because the [local] rich nature provides them food and shelter’.84 British merchants in Nairobi also praised Japanese merchants’ marketing methods that included visiting remote inland areas and sending samples by mail prior to their arrival, so that they could adjust to the demands of the local people. The Japanese differentiated this method from British merchants’ ways of ‘just sitting and waiting till the orders come to them’ or ‘starting business through the letter correspondence’.85 Conversely, Japanese reports note the fundamental lack of British merchants’ attempts to meet local demand, quoting the response of a British intermediary merchant in South Africa to a question regarding why the British were selling

80

81

82 83

84

Japanese ‘Nairobi’ jackets sold at 7 shillings per pound, but English ones cost at least 15 shillings. Gaimusho¯ Tsu¯sho¯-kyoku, Consular Report, 1932, 110–11. Gaimusho¯ Cho¯sabu, Consular Report, 1934, 64. See for the price, Nihon gomuseihin yushutsu kumiai [Japan Association of Rubber-Products Exports], Chosakenkyu no. 7: Yushutsu gomu gutsu no ugoki [Investigation Research, Vol. 7: The Trends in Exported Rubber Shoes] (Tokyo: Gomuseihin yushutsu kumiai, 1936–40). Gaimusho¯ Tsu¯sho¯-kyoku, Consular Report, 1928, 161–5, 337–46; Nakagawa, ‘About East Africa’, 8. Nihon bo¯eki shinko¯ kyo¯kai, ‘Analysis of Japan’s Exports’. Japanese reports state that this clothing was not targeted at white people or Indians, but merekani targeted Africans and Arabs. Gaimusho¯ Tsu¯sho¯-kyoku, Consular Report, 1932, 107. 85 Ibid., 110.

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the global politics of european-style dress

such expensive goods to African locals: the Japanese merchants were astonished when the British merchant replied without hesitation, ‘Why, there is no need to sell things cheap to savages.’86 We can see here a remarkable difference in attitude towards selling clothes to East Africans between the British and Japanese. Therefore, it is understandable that Japanese reports confidently declare themselves as the sole providers of these new clothing products for East Africa; they regarded all European or American products as ‘no rivals’.87 Contrary to the simplistic explanation that Japanese products were just cheaper, or simplified copies of European or American originals, this section demonstrates a deeper history. First, these popularized clothes were not categorized as European-style by their contemporaries and, second, East African buyers purchased these products for their new features, not just because they were cheaper copies.88 Furthermore, Japanese sellers were aware of these reasons while marketing their products, with practices that contrasted with the colonial lassitude of British competitors.

conclusion This chapter explores the varied and complex contexts for wearing, buying, and selling European-style clothing in Egypt, Japan, and East Africa in the first three decades of the twentieth century, when European-style dress was already introduced and partly adopted, but not worn by the majority. To understand the globalization of Western-style clothing, it is insufficient to explain its starting point, and the logics surrounding the initial adoption 86

87 88

Gaimusho¯ Cho¯sa-kyoku, Eiryo¯ higashi Afurika jijo¯ [Report of Consulate Kuga Narumi in 1934: State of Affairs in British East Africa] (Tokyo: MOFA, 1934), 112. The term ‘savage’ is a translation from the original Japanese text. It is not noted what the exact English word was. Ibid., 110. Maria Suriano provides an elaborate look at the clothing styles in interwar Tanganyika. Maria Suriano, ‘Clothing and the Changing Identities of Tanganyikan Urban Youths, 1920s–1950s’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 20/1 (2008), 95–115; Maria Suriano, ‘Local Ideas of Fashion and Translocal Connections: A View from Upcountry Tanganyika’, in Francesca Declich (ed.), Translocal Connections across the Indian Ocean: Swahili Speaking Networks on the Move (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 163–89.

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phase. This chapter has illustrated the hitherto overlooked perspectives of ‘abandoning’, ‘conformity’, and ‘copying’ and showcased the versatile and dynamic contexts that the diffusion of European-style clothing created. The first section showed that the relationship between ‘abandoning the indigenous element’ and ‘adopting European styles’ was not a trade-off, describing the prevalent logic among groups of women in Egypt, who were the most advanced in adopting European clothing and were also the last to abandon veiling. The second section also clearly shows that ‘buying to conform’ and ‘having desires and yearning for material abundance and diversification’ were not in a trade-off relationship either, but nurtured each other to encourage the purchase of European-style business attire in 1910s–1930s Japan. The last section not only provided another case of the powerful agency of copied products, but also showed the complexity of the contexts in play. While elsewhere, or in general, these products would surely have been positioned as cheaper Asian copies of European-style clothing, East African wearers and Japanese sellers regarded them neither as completely European nor Japanese, but primarily local. In the past twenty years, the studies on adoption and diffusion of European-style clothing have explored many local, interregional, and trans-cultural contexts of the diffusion of Western dress. The history of the adoption and diffusion of European-style clothing is not a history of mono-linear, top-down diffusion from a limited number of centres; rather, it is a vibrant set of histories involving multi-regional interactions and complex and varied contexts for each location, society, fashion system, and clothing item.

select bibliography Anjo, Hissako and Antonia Finnane, ‘Tailoring in China and Japan: Cultural Transfer and Cutting Techniques in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 263–88.

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the global politics of european-style dress Baron, Beth, ‘Unveiling in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt: Practical and Symbolic Considerations’, Middle Eastern Studies, 25/3 (1989), 370–86. Fair, Laura, ‘Dressing up: Clothing, Class and Gender in Post-Abolition Zanzibar’, Journal of African History, 39/1 (1998), 63–94. Ito¯, Rui, Hiroko Sakamoto, and Tani E. Barlow (eds.), Modan Gā ru to Shokuminchiteki Kindai: Higashi Ajia ni okeru Teikoku, Shihon, Jendā (Modern Girls and Colonial Modernity: Empire, Capital and Gender) (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 2010). Minami, Hiroshi and Shakaishinri Kenkyu¯jo (Institute of Social Psychological Research), Taisho¯ Bunka (Taisho¯ Cultures) (Tokyo: Keiso¯ Shobo¯, 1965). Niessen, Sandra, ‘Afterword: Fashion’s Fallacy’, in M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik (eds.), Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity through Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 209–17. Russell, Mona L., Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education, and National Identity, 1863–1922 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Simmel, Georg, Philosophie der Mode/Zur Psychologie der Mode: Zwei Essays (Berlin: Pan-Verlag o. J., 1905), trans. David Frisby and Mike Feathersone (London: Sage, 1998). Suriano, Maria, ‘Local Ideas of Fashion and Translocal Connections: A View from Upcountry Tanganyika’, in Francesca Declich (ed.), Translocal Connections across the Indian Ocean: Swahili Speaking Networks on the Move (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 163–89. Tarlo, Emma, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). ¯ oka, ‘Sho¯hishakai no Tenkai to Tasaki, Nobuyoshi and Satoshi O Hyakkaten’ (Consumer Society and Department Stores), in Taketoshi Yamamoto and Tamotsu Nishizawa (eds.), Hyakkaten no Bunkashi: Nihon no Sho¯hishakai (Cultural History of Department Stores: Consumer Society in Japan) (Tokyo: Sekaisiso¯sha, 1999), 14–61. Tranberg Hansen, Karen, ‘Fashioning: Zambian Moments’, Journal of Material Culture, 8/3 (2003), 301–9. Tranberg Hansen, Karen, ‘Global Fashion Encounters and Africa: Affective Materialities in Zambia’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 289–305.

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hissako anjo, emi goto, and miki sugiura Tranberg Hansen, Karen and D. Soyini Madison (eds.), African Dress: Fashion, Agency, Performance (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Welters, Linda and Abby Lillethun, Fashion History: A Global View (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

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FASHIONING DIASPORAS Jewish and African Experiences, c. 1800–1950 susan b. kaiser and nina l. cole

The whole idea of ‘modern’ fashion cannot be understood without the interruptions, interventions, and innovations of diasporas. In this chapter, we focus on case studies of Jewish and African diasporas to illustrate the importance of bridging concepts of fashion and diaspora. Together, these concepts point to the interdependencies between changes in time and place. On the surface, fashion is more about changes over time, and diaspora is more about changes in place. Yet joint consideration reveals how migration, whether forced or voluntary, has fostered transformations in modern, global fashion history, based upon not only class and labour dynamics, but also cultural and aesthetic hybridization. The concept of diaspora emerged from the ancient Greek word meaning dispersion; the root word in English, ‘spore’, roughly refers to the metaphor of sowing seed.1 As early as 2,000 years ago, Jewish people dispersed from the Middle East and formed new diasporas around the world. They moved to Europe, the Russian Empire, and elsewhere, including the United States, at various stages. Based in part on their historical inability in Europe to own land and their focus on commerce and craft in the avenues available to them, the Jewish diaspora has had a tremendous influence on the development of the modern textile and apparel industries. Jewish tailors, garment manufacturers, and fashion designers also influenced the ubiquitous and exclusive styles of modernity; through and despite displacement, people of

1

s.v. ‘diaspora’, Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition (2019), https://oed.com.

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the Jewish diaspora have created new senses of place and belonging in modern society. African diasporas have also had an important influence on modern fashion. Histories of enslavement, forced movement, and marginalization have been resisted through diasporic processes of self-fashioning, cultural retention, and creative remixing. These latter processes have interrupted binary formulations of tradition and modernity, asserting pride in identity and communal belonging in visual and embodied ways.2 The styles of the African diaspora have influenced not only European and American tastes throughout histories of contact, but also their textile production and manufacturing techniques and dyeing practices, among other advancements. Yet these ‘diasporic aesthetics’ and technological contributions are obscured in dominant narratives of Euromodernity and the modern fashion system.3 Exploring the intersections between fashion and diaspora encourages a plural understanding of modernity and shifting Eurocentric interpretations of margin and centre, thereby reshaping narratives of modern fashion.4 In addition to Jewish and African diasporas, there are multiple others that have shaped modern fashion history: for example, Chinese, Greek, Indian, Pakistani, and Spanish. Since the 1980s, and especially by the early decades of the twenty-first century, the transnational Muslim fashion diaspora has spread ‘modest fashion’ through digital marketing and social media discourse.5 As the focus here is on the period 2

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Steeve O. Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004). Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 1994); Stuart Hall and KuanHsing Chen, ‘The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Kuan-Hsing Chen’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 484–503. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 44–5. Emma Tarlo, Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith (Oxford: Berg, 2010); Reina Lewis, ‘Introduction: Mediating Modesty’ and ‘Fashion Forward and Faith-tastic! Online Modest Fashion and the Development of Women as Religious Interpreters and Intermediaries’, in Reina Lewis (ed.), Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 1–13,

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between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, we address two case studies of Jewish and African diasporas as pinnacles of influence on modern fashion. We return to the broader implications of fashion and diaspora at the end of this chapter. Through diasporic experiences, concepts of roots and routes intersect with those of genealogy and geography.6 These experiences are not necessarily linear, but rather circuitous. As historians Boyarin and Boyarin argue, Jewish diasporic subjectivities have been formulated in ways that are necessarily flexible and reinventive in an ongoing way.7 Further, diasporic identities ‘can only continue to exist as a product of mixing’ through the hybridity fostered by a combination of religious and ethnic identity, and participation in ‘common cultural life’.8 Similarly, theoretical understandings of African diasporic subjectivities frequently build on W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of ‘double consciousness’, which involves immersion in one’s own diasporic community as well as a larger, oppressive and dominant system.9 It involves the ability to interpret and enact both the diasporic and the hegemonic cultures. Diasporic subjectivities frequently involve processes of reimagining, working against essentialism, and transcending binary oppositions, such as: diaspora versus homeland, unity/singularity versus plurality, past versus future, global versus local. For example, historian Tanisha Ford describes ‘the interweaving of layered threads that connect black people’ in the transnational diaspora, with diasporas fostering ‘cultural remixing on the local level’.10 Relatedly, Jewish studies scholar Moshe Rosman

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41–66; Reina Lewis, Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015). Stuart Hall, ‘Creolization, Diaspora, and Hybridity in the Context of Globalization’, in Okwui Enwezor et al. (eds.), Créolité and Creolization: Documenta 11_Platform3 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2003), 185–98; Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, ‘Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity’, Critical Inquiry, 19/4 (1993), 693–725. 8 Boyarin and Boyarin, ‘Diaspora’. Ibid., 721. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co, 1997). Tanisha C. Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 9.

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characterizes diasporic history and general history as an ‘environment full of chemical reagents that are constantly reacting with each other: sometimes mixing, sometimes making new compounds, sometimes inertly bouncing off each other’.11 While the concept of diaspora is centuries old, the fields of Africana Studies, Jewish studies, cultural studies, and others – along with increased consciousness of communities with minority statuses – have helped to expand the use of the term since the 1960s. Theorists such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Carol Tulloch have pointed to the ways in which diasporas entail ambivalence, ambiguity, hybridization, and articulation across diverse ways of being and becoming.12 These ways of knowing are intersectional, including not only race or religion, but also gender, class, age, and sexuality.13 They are about circuitous routes that have included the flow of people, products, and profits in systems designed to foster modern industrial capitalism.14 As the following case studies reveal in different ways, the playing field of modern capitalism was not level, especially in terms of the labour upon which the industrial systems relied.

jewish diaspora Reflecting on the 3,500-year-old religious body and tradition of Judaism, Karen Anijar notes the contrast between the congregation’s (including her own) largely mainstream, modern attire and the rabbi’s traditional, orthodox attire at her mother’s funeral in New York City.15 In Hasidic Jewish diasporic neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, men especially maintain a distinctive style of dress. Details that demonstrate men’s degree of 11

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Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Liverpool: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007), 46. Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017); Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Carol Tulloch, The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 32. Hall, ‘Creolization, Diaspora, and Hybridity’. Karen Anijar, ‘Jewish Genes, Jewish Jeans: A Fashionable Body’, in Linda B. Arthur (ed.), Religion, Dress, and the Body (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 181–200.

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religiosity include the length of their beards, their type of headcovering, the side curls in their hair, and the cut of their suits. Hasidic and some other Orthodox Jewish women dress modestly but wear wigs (called sheitls) to cover their hair, once they are married.16 Hasidic women’s dress typically blends in with mainstream fashion norms and goes relatively unnoticed by individuals who are not part of the Orthodox community.17 In an early twentyfirst-century ethnographic study in Brooklyn, young Hasidic women negotiated standards of modesty with modern materialism by highlighting the concept of being ‘with it’, rather than ‘fashionable’.18 In Anijar’s reflective piece, she contemplates how – with the exception of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men – Jewish bodies have become ‘indistinguishable from the body of the rest of the American nation [through assimilation] . . . The assembly lines and consumer goods impetuously transformed the Jewish body . . . in a political triumph of intensified capitalism and capitalistic development.’ She goes on to note, however, that consumer capitalism ‘was not antithetical to Jewish tradition’, and Jewish holidays had melded into the fashion cycle.19 Her observation is consistent with the idea that Jewish diasporic subjectivities have been formulated in ways that are necessarily flexible and reinventive, mixing Jewish cultural identity with participation in ‘common cultural life’.20 These diasporic subjectivities emerge from ongoing, creative tensions between genealogy and geography, roots and routes, and tradition and fashion.21 Jewishness has endured for more than 3,000 years, but no single narrative can capture both a people and a faith in such dispersed places and societies.22 Moreover, intersectionalities among gender, 16

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Emma Tarlo, Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair (London: Oneworld Publications, 2016), 107. Ibid., 110. Ayala Fader, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Anijar, ‘Jewish Genes, Jewish Jeans’, 182–3, 185. Boyarin and Boyarin, ‘Diaspora’, 721. Ibid., 724; Hall, ‘Creolization, Diaspora, and Hybridity’. Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History?; Adam Kirsch, ‘Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write’, The New Yorker, 19 March 2018, www.new yorker.com/magazine/2018/03/26/why-jewish-history-is-so-hard-to-write (accessed 25 April 2023).

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class, nation, and ethnicity complicate the extent to which Jewish history can be characterized as coherent or continuous. In the nineteenth century, Jewish historians tried ‘to sew up the tear in Jewish memory that was produced by modernity’.23 Indeed, tailoring was a profession amenable to dispersal and migration, given the mobility of clothing production. The long-standing relationship between Jews and tailoring has religious associations, as Orthodox Jews following the biblical decree that garments should contain no linen helped to create market demand for skilled Jewish tailors.24 In 1832, Isaak Markus Jost argued that Jewish people suited the modern world, given their flexibility and adaptability to different circumstances of place and opportunity.25 Heinrich Graetz wrote that Judaism is a religion of the future, given its Messianic hope, ‘eternally renewed spirit’, and ability to assume different forms as necessary to survive or thrive in modern nations in which the diasporas have been embedded.26

Nazi Persecution By the early twentieth century, there were a number of Jewish clothing makers and shop owners, including department stores, in Germany and Austria. Nathan Israel in Berlin, the oldest and first Jewish-owned department store (since 1815), employed 2,000 workers.27 By 1925, Berlin had become a centre of ready-to-wear production and distribution, as well as a hub of artistic and intellectual life.28 However, the Great Depression, beginning in 1929, devastated the German economy as it did elsewhere. The Nazi party platform fostered anti-Semitism in part by including a plan 23

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Michael A. Meyer, ‘New Reflections on Jewish Historiography’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 97/4 (2007), 666. Katrina Honeyman, Well Suited: A History of the Leeds Clothing Industry 1850–1990 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15. Kirsch, ‘Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write’. Ibid.; Michael A. Meyer, ‘The Emergence of Jewish Historiography: Motives and Motifs’, History and Theory, 27/4 (1988), 160–75. Christian Schramm, ‘Architecture of the German Department Store’, trans. John Gort, in Roberta S. Kremer (ed.), Broken Threads: The Destruction of the Jewish Fashion Industry in Germany and Austria (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 31. Ingrid Loschek, ‘Contributions of Jewish Fashion Designers in Berlin’, trans. John Gort, in Kremer (ed.), Broken Threads, 59.

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to assist non-Jewish small business owners and to dissolve department stores such as Israel’s.29 The Jewish influence on fashion was palpable and generated considerable jealous anger on the part of Nazis, whose attempts to promote Aryan (‘German made’) clothing labels such as Adefa were not successful. Even the wives of Nazi officers preferred Jewish companies to Adefa. On 9 November 1938, the Nazis looted and burned hundreds of Jewish synagogues, shops, department stores, and other businesses in a pogrom (i.e. coordinated street violence resulting in the massacre or persecution of a religious or ethnic group), known as Kristallnacht (‘Night of Broken Glass’). The Nazis attacked the Nathan Israel department store with sticks and steel rods, and arrested all of the Jewish employees who were working that day.30 Holocaust violence continued for years; the Nazis took over and erased Jewish-owned factories and stores, and killed millions of Jews in concentration camps. According to Magde Goebbels, wife of a chief Nazi propagandist, ‘[a]long with Jews, elegance disappeared from Berlin’.31

The Historical Development of Jewish Textile and Fashion Expertise The Holocaust and the corresponding disappearance of the textile, apparel, and retail industries in Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s need to be understood in relation to the larger context of anti-Semitism in diverse places around the world. The historical underpinnings of centuries of discrimination against, and stereotypes of, Jewish people set the stage for understanding their importance in the development of the modern textile and fashion industries. Historically unable to own land in many diasporic locations, there was understandably more of an occupational expertise in commerce and craft, rather than agriculture. However, Jews were excluded from craft guilds in Europe and confined to the western portion of the Russian Empire – the Pale of Settlement, 29

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Irene Guenther, ‘The Destruction of a Culture and an Industry’, in Kremer (ed.), Broken Threads, 78. Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 163. Loschek, ‘Contributions of Jewish Fashion Designers in Berlin’, 72.

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including Belarus, Lithuania, Moldavia, Poland, and Ukraine. Common occupations included tailoring, the peddling of textiles and used clothing from village to village (shetl to shetl), and shopkeeping. Economic activity highlighted goods that could be crafted and carried or worn. Most Jewish people were poor, but by the end of the eighteenth century, they had developed systems of travelling and selling fabrics and used clothes (often from the middle and upper classes) across German villages, circulating not only fashion but also news, humour, and stories.32 In London, too, Jewish peddlers offered inexpensive alternatives to people in the growing population who could not afford new clothes.33 Migration from Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire to England and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries converged with a number of circumstances to establish the central role of the Jewish diaspora in the modern textile and fashion industries. For example, the already existing tailoring business in London, famously on Savile Row, was conducive to the skills tailors from Eastern Europe and Russia brought to the industry (Figure 33.1). Likewise, the burgeoning wholesale bespoke suit industry in Leeds attracted Jewish tailors and garment workers migrating from the Pale of Settlement, where East European Jews had been restricted.34 The invention and industrial diffusion of the sewing machine, as well as the expansion of changing fashions and mass production in womenswear by the early twentieth century further increased the demand for garment workers. For example, a sizeable portion of Britain’s market for men’s outerwear was owned by Jewish tailoring businesses based in Leeds during the interwar years.35 Further, because Jewish communities had been left to their own devices to care for the poor in their villages and had developed a socialist consciousness to resist tyrannical forces, they immigrated with a critical awareness of labour rights. This consciousness had a direct influence on the development of labour 32

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Christopher R. Friedrichs, ‘From Rags to Riches: Jews as Producers and Purveyors of Fashion’, in Kremer (ed.), Broken Threads, 20. ‘Jews, Money, Myth’, Exhibition at The Jewish Museum London (19 March– 17 October 2019), https://jewishmuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/jews-moneymyth/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Honeyman, Well Suited, 2. 35 Ibid., 5.

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Figure 33.1 Jewish tailors’ workshop in the East End of London, c. 1910– 14. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum London.

unions, such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), beginning in New York City.

Immigration to New York City Historians Caryn Aviv and David Shneer argue for ‘a new Jewish map’ that moves away from a binary opposition between diaspora and homeland (i.e. Jerusalem), asserting that there are ‘infinitely creative ways of expressing what it means to be at home, as Jews’.36 They described New York City as ‘the ground zero of the diaspora business’ and a place ‘where Jewish identity and memory are manufactured, performed, reinvented, contested, then circulated around the world’.37 In the present day, as a place with the largest urban Jewish population in the world, New York City joins other major international sites with significant numbers of people of Jewish descent, including Jerusalem, Moscow, and Los Angeles.38 36

37

Caryn S. Aviv and David Shneer, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2005), xvi, 176. Ibid., 138. 38 Ibid., 140.

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Revolutionary unrest and its quashing in Europe were among the factors contributing to the migration of German Jewish people to New York between 1840 and 1880. Jewish Germans came to New York and either peddled to begin to accumulate funds, or joined the menswear industry in various capacities, including tailoring. This wave of immigration coincided with a growing demand for economical and well-made men’s business wear, and the industrial use of sewing machines. Although clothing companies in New York had initially been established by non-Jewish tailors and merchants, by 1878 the majority in New York were Jewish-owned.39 Another pathway was for the recent immigrants to peddle in port cities in the eastern United States until they earned enough money to establish a retail store elsewhere in the United States or to get into wholesale manufacturing. Beyond New York City, the Jewish-owned garment industry expanded to other cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, and Chicago. The most massive migrations, however, occurred from the Pale between the early 1880s and the early 1900s. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander III, in 1881, and the ascension of his even more autocratic and aggressive son to power, the Jewish diaspora in the Pale was subjected to a series of pogroms, which drove millions of Jewish people to migrate to the United States and England between 1882 and 1914.40 Jewish tailors and other workers had an important impact on the growth of the ready-to-wear industries. Approximately half of the Eastern European Jewish immigrants were experienced tailors or seamstresses, but about half learned to sew after immigrating.41 The menswear industry fostered systems of ‘sweating’: a unique labour process based on a subcontracting system, whereby, for example, recent immigrants stitched men’s scarves on sewing machines, usually in tenement apartments in the Lower East Side of New York City; the working conditions and pay 39

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Phyllis Dillon and Andrew Godley, ‘The Evolution of the Jewish Garment Industry, 1840–1940’, in Rebecca Kobrin (ed.), Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 904. ‘Modern Jewish History: The Pale of Settlement’, Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-pale-of-settlement (accessed 25 April 2023). Nancy L. Green (ed.), Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

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were often oppressive.42 The labour situation became even more precarious as the womenswear industry came to dominate over menswear; womenswear was more susceptible to seasonal fashion changes, short deadlines, and periods in which workers were clocked out. While the womenswear industry did offer entry-level employment for Jewish workers (primarily young women), the working conditions were even less predictable than in the menswear sector. The shift in focus and intensity from the menswear to the womenswear business around 1900 is sometimes called ‘the great transition’.43 Ready-to-wear women’s clothing at the time included shirtwaist blouses and skirts and, earlier, had started with mantles (scarves), some suits, millinery, underwear, and corset covers.44 It was hard to standardize womenswear for mass production, given the shapes of women’s bodies, so separates tended to work better. Shirtwaist blouses, modelled after tailored and mass-produced men’s shirts, became staple items – worn with long skirts – in bourgeois female consumers’ wardrobes. They were relatively easy to ‘knock off’ with less expensive fabrics, and they were also ubiquitous in working-class women’s wardrobes, including garment makers’, the vast majority of whom were recently immigrated, young Jewish women (Figure 33.2). Historian David Biale notes the extent to which modernization in Jewish histories has been ‘extraordinarily uneven’ and argues that Jewish identities did not necessarily play an explicit role in Jewish contributions to ‘majority cultures’ in the context of modernity.45 A case in point is the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company; this story highlights the complexities of intersectional Jewish diasporic identities. In the early 1890s, two Jewish men, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, immigrated to New York City from Russia. They both arrived broke and worked in the garment industry with dreams of building successful and modern American businesses, but spent time in sweatshop conditions for about ten years. Together, they developed the Triangle 42 43 44 45

Ibid., 18. Dillon and Godley, ‘The Evolution of the Jewish Garment Industry’, 1155. Ibid., 1103. David Biale, Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 277, 726.

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Figure 33.2 Shirtwaist workers in an East Coast United States garment shop, c. 1900–10. T. J. Coe. The Nassau Photo Co. Courtesy of the Kheel Center, Cornell University.

Shirtwaist Company after they met in their twenties and opened two factory spaces on the eighth and ninth floors of the Asche building in the Greenwich neighbourhood of New York City.46 The large windows and high ceilings made the company seem like the epitome of a modern industrial space.47 Blanck and Harris became known as ‘The Shirtwaist Kings’. Among the 500 employees who worked in their factories – mostly Jewish and Italian female immigrants – was a garment worker and the first ILGWU woman to be hired as an organizer, Pauline Newman. She described the modern space as follows: ‘The same shirt waists, shirt waists and more shirt waists. The same machines, the same surroundings. The day is long and the task tiresome. In despair I ask – “dear God will it ever be 46

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David Von Drehle, ‘No, History Was Not Unfair to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Owners’, Washington Post, 20 December 2018, www.washingtonpost .com/opinions/no-history-was-not-unfair-to-the-triangle-shirtwaist-factory-o wners/2018/12/20/10fb050e-046a-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html (accessed 25 April 2023). Jamila Twignot (producer/director), Triangle: Remembering the Fire, American Experience (2018), www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/ triangle/#transcript (accessed 25 April 2023).

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different?”’48 The blouses sold for about $3 each, but Newman started at $1.50 per week (with fourteen-hour days, as much as seven days a week).49 Workers were docked for broken sewing machine needles and ‘wasted thread’.50 One of the stairwell doors was routinely locked, and the makers’ purses were checked to make sure they did not steal any fabric, thread, or blouses. But there was one advantage to being in a modern space that brought hundreds of workers together; they were able to interact with each other and to organize to fight for their rights.51 In 1909, 20,000 shirtwaist makers went on strike (Figure 33.3). Blanck and Harris fought against unionization with the support of hired thugs and even the police.52 Then, tragically, on a Saturday early evening in March 1911, as the garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were in the process of clocking out, a fire broke out; thousands of horrified onlookers in Greenwich Village watched ninety young women jumping out of the building to avoid being burned. Overall, 146 workers died; most of them were women, and some were teenagers.53 Public opinion began to galvanize, and ILGWU made some strides towards improving workers’ pay and conditions. But some factory owners continued to fight against unionization.54 The story of the Shirtwaist Triangle Company reveals the contradictions and complexities associated with social mobility and labour in the modern Jewish diaspora, highlighting the importance of class and gender, as well as 48

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Pauline Newman, ‘Letter to Michael and Hugh’, Remembering the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire, Cornell University (1951), https://trianglefire.ilr.cor nell.edu/primary/letters/PaulineNewman.html (accessed 25 April 2023). ‘United States Census Bureau History: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire’, United States Census Bureau (2016), www.census.gov/history/www/homepage_arc hive/2016/march_2016.html (accessed 25 April 2023). Newman, ‘Letter to Michael and Hugh’. ‘Shirtwaist Kings’ (2011), www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/ shirtwaist-kings/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Lucie Levine, ‘Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the Women Who Fought for Labor Reform’, 6sqft (25 March 2019), www.6sqft .com/remembering-the-triangle-shirtwaist-factory-fire-and-the-women-whofought-for-labor-reform/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Kheel Center, Cornell University, http://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/victims Witnesses/victimsList.html (accessed 25 April 2023). ‘Shirtwaist Kings’.

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Figure 33.3 Women shirtwaist strikers in New York holding copies of The Call, a local socialist newspaper; a placard with Hebrew writing hangs in the background, 1910. Unknown photographer, Munsey’s Magazine. Courtesy of the Kheel Center, Cornell University.

ethnicity and religion. It is also a reminder that Jewish diasporic identity is not essentialist or monolithic. Jewish workers built influential unions such as the ILGWU, but many also strove to achieve better education and greater material wealth; within a generation or two, the Jewish working class gradually diminished with social mobility, many entering the middle class.55 Still, the Jewish diaspora remained a potent force in the development of the US textile, apparel, and retail industries, from New York to points west.56

55 56

Green, Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora, 5. Sean Martin, Stitch in Time: The Cleveland Garment Industry (Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society, 2015).

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Jewish Immigration to California Since the 1840s, the diaspora had already made a foothold as far west as California, due in part to the Gold Rush. Jacob Youphes (1831–1908), who changed his name to Jacob Davis, had been a tailor in Lithuania and continued his craft by making trousers for goldminers in Reno, Nevada. He designed a process of using copper rivets to strengthen the pockets of work trousers, but could not afford to file for a patent. Having purchased fabric from a dry goods store owned by Levi Strauss (1829–1902), he contacted Strauss to see if he would be interested in filing for a patent with him. In 1873, the patent was approved, and Strauss hired Davis to oversee the production of what eventually became denim jeans in San Francisco.57 Levi Strauss had initially immigrated to New York from Bavaria in 1847. He peddled and learned the retail business before migrating to San Francisco to set up a West Coast branch of his uncle’s wholesale dry goods business, J. Strauss & Co.58 Internal US migration contributed to the spread of the textile, apparel, and retail industries, and Jewish connections across these industries fostered business partnerships. For example, between 1915 and 2015, Levi Strauss purchased woven denim fabric from Cone Mills in North Carolina. The denim factory was one of the textile mills founded by Moses and Caesar Cone,59 the sons of Herman Kahn (1828–1897), who had migrated from Bavaria to New York in the 1840s, changed his name to assimilate, and opened a retail business.60 Internal Jewish migration from New York to Los Angeles played a key role in the establishment of knitting mills and clothing factories in Southern California, as well as the Hollywood motion picture industry, much of which was founded in the mid-1920s by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, by way of New York. 57

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Dillon and Godley, ‘The Evolution of the Jewish Garment Industry’, 1027–31. Ibid., 1026. ‘Who We Are’, Cone Denim, www.conedenim.com/who-we-are/our-timeline (accessed 15 April 2021). ‘Cone, Herman Portrait’, n.d., www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/images/ portrait-of-herman-cone-nd/ (accessed 15 April 2021).

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Samuel Goldwyn, Jess Lasky, and Adolph Zukor, for example, had previously worked in the New York garment industry and knew about the use of fashion to foster new hopes and dreams. Hollywood became part of a larger effort to sell images of glamour and leisure. Jewish costume designers such as Adrian (1903–59) and Edith Head (1897–1981) innovated images for Hollywood that sold very well to audiences throughout the United States and internationally.61 At the turn of the century, Hollywood had one clothing manufacturer (shirts); by 1937, there were 130 members in the Associated Apparel Manufacturers of Los Angeles, and 250 of the largest US department stores kept buyers permanently in the city. Especially between 1927 and 1929, there was an explosion of fashion manufacturing and wholesaling, and its publicity machine offered ‘new models of accessible glamour to a mass audience’.62 Beginning in 1933, female consumers around the United States could buy knockoffs of the dresses worn in films in the cinema fashion shops across the country. There were 400 of these stores around the country by 1937.63 Hollywood helped to distribute California’s modern ‘outdoorsy’ style: streamlined, casual separates that were revolutionizing the way people dressed for leisure activities even in the smallest towns of the United States. On 15 May 1925, Fred Cole (1901–1964) opened a swimwear division of West Coast Manchester Knitting Mills, which his parents owned. Cole (a former collegiate swimmer and silent movie actor) converted production from underwear to ‘colorful swimsuits with sex appeal’.64 Cole capitalized on the ‘bathing beauty look’ emerging from Hollywood,65 minimizing the coverage of women’s bodies and saving on material costs.66 Along with Catalina and Mabs of Hollywood, Cole put California on the map as the 61 62

63 64

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See Chapter 26 by Stella Bruzzi in this volume. Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 213. Ibid., 188. ‘Fred Cole Dead’, The New York Times, 21 September 1964, www .nytimes.com/1964/09/21/fred-cole-dead.html (accessed 25 April 2023); Marian Hall, Marjorie Carne, and Sylvia Sheppard, California Fashion: From the Old West to New Hollywood (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 43. Maureen Reilly, California Casual Fashions, 1930s–1970s (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2001), 62. Hall et al., California Fashion, 44–5.

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‘swimwear capital of the world’. By the 1950s, Cole of California had become an international, multimillion-dollar corporation.67 In the 1930s, Hollywood films also fostered the cultural figure of the cowboy. In Stagecoach (1939), John Wayne represented the ultimate, imaginary symbol of Western masculine authenticity (although the cowboy concept derived from the appropriation of Latin American dress). Western films helped to rebrand Levi Strauss jeans from work trousers to cowboy style, their logo clearly product-placed on John Wayne’s backside as he climbed into the stagecoach. Further adding to the glamour of the cowboy – especially the singing cowboy – came by way of Jewish tailors through designs of brightly coloured, embroidered shirts with yokes and snap closures. For example, Nathan Turk (1895–1978) was an avid silent movie fan born in Belarus. At the age of ten, he became an apprentice to a tailor in Minsk and, next, immigrated to Los Angeles by way of New York where he designed beautiful embroidered shirts, drawing inspiration from symbols from Eastern Europe.68 Yet another mid-century Jewish figure who shaped fashion history was designer Rudi Gernreich (1922–1985), who escaped antiSemitic persecution by the Nazis when he immigrated with his mother from Austria to Los Angeles at the age of sixteen.69 In Los Angeles, he studied art and dance, began to design dancewear, and then expanded to fashion and costume design. He designed soft, often knit, apparel for women, freeing them from the genderrestrictive styles of the 1950s. Many of his designs functioned as ‘unisex’ styles. Gernreich created a scandal when he designed the ‘monokini’, or topless bathing suit, for women in 1964. He is now hailed as an avant-garde designer who used fashion as ‘a platform for innovative designs that sought to empower those long marginalized or devalued in mainstream American life’.70 His work has 67 68

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Reilly, California Casual Fashions, 68. Holly George-Warren and Michelle Freedman, How the West Was Worn (New York: Harry N. Abrams, with the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles, 2000), 57. Tom Teicholz, ‘Rudi Gernreich: Fashion – Made for These Times’, Forbes, 21 May 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/tomteicholz/2019/05/21/rudi-gernreichfashion-made-for-these-times/#556f2bd518c1 (accessed 25 April 2023). Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén, ‘Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich’, Fashion Theory, 24/5 (2020), 783–94.

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Figure 33.4 ‘Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich’ exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, 2019. Photo by Jamia Weir. Courtesy of Jamia Weir.

also been described as addressing the ‘Jewish tradition of welcoming the stranger . . . His apparel welcomed everyone into the fold – regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and body type, broadening the scope of who is fashionable’ (Figure 33.4).71 Gernreich was also a social activist who co-founded the gaypositive Mattachine Society with his then-partner Harry Hay in 1950. His intersectional identity and futuristic designs parallel Biale’s observation, noted earlier, that Jewish identities do not necessarily play an explicit, unitary role in the contributions of Jewish people to the majority cultures in which they live – including to the modern textile and fashion industries.72 There are ‘plural Jewish identities and cultures’ that interface in diverse ways with majority cultures, resulting in multiple and complex ways of knowing and becoming.73 71 73

Teicholz, ‘Rudi Gernreich’. 72 Biale, Cultures of the Jews, 726. Meyer, ‘New Reflections on Jewish Historiography’, 661.

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Having established the extent to which the Jewish diaspora has shaped the course of the textile, apparel, and retailing industries, we turn now to the African diaspora, where the story begins with fibre production, especially cotton. Promulgated by the history of the slave trade from Africa directed by imperial nations such as Britain and Portugal, to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, for example, a ‘disconnect’ between the production of fibre and the consumption of fashion becomes an important part of the story of fashion and modernity. Moving beyond this disconnect became a vital part of African diasporic consciousness through the process of styling and fashioning the body, as we demonstrate in the following section.74

african diaspora The forced separation of Africans from their homelands and the associated oppressions as enslaved people necessitated a kind of double consciousness in order to survive and claim agency, both amidst and after enslavement. These epistemologies emerged not only from transatlantic slave routes and racial capitalism from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, but also through the aesthetic traditions and embodied ways of knowing they carried with them from Africa to the Americas.75 The African diaspora has made an indelible mark on what we know as fashion today from the brutal systems of enslaved and unpaid labour that made cotton such a lucrative business for the United States and Britain, to the fashionable clothes that became more affordable for modern consumers, to inspirations of style and concepts of visual mixing, hybridity, and articulation of colours, shapes, and patterns.76

Cotton For at least 5,000 years, Africans had developed expertise – as had other polities and cultures – in the cultivation and manufacture of 74 75

76

See Chapter 12 by Steeve Buckridge in Volume I. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; repr., Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Rachel Worth, Fashion and Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

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cotton fibre.77 West Africans had established systems for spinning and weaving to make fabric;78 Africans also innovated dyeing and printing practices, with indigo playing a major role in local, regional, and global economic systems.79 Dyeing techniques and outcomes differed between West African indigo centres using large-scale dye-pits and smaller scale women’s workshops, located around Yorubaland and the Benin kingdom, producing unique regional variations.80 With the colonization of Africa and India as well as the mechanization of cotton ginning (to clean the fibre) and spinning (to turn the fibre into yarn) in the latter part of the eighteenth century, historian Giorgio Riello notes how a triangular, transcontinental system of trade emerged, reconfiguring the global economy and creating a horrendous, dehumanizing system: textiles produced in Europe were exchanged for enslaved Africans; enslaved people were shipped to the Americas, where they were exchanged for raw cotton; the raw cotton, in turn, was imported into England to be processed and manufactured for further trade and consumer use, continuing the vicious cycle.81 Beginning in the fifteenth century, the Portuguese slave trade transported enslaved Africans to Brazil; European colonists also established outposts and plantations in the Caribbean islands.82 In eighteenth-century Britain, there was a strong motivation to replace imported Indian cottons with fabrics produced domestically through new industrial processes. Cotton clothing had become even more affordable to more classes and hence associated with the ‘democratization’ of fashion; it was a fashionable convenience and pleasure for many consumers. Because of its affordability and ease of care, cotton clothing had tremendous advantages over wool and silk for working- and middle-class people. The problem was that the ‘human comfort’ of white Britons and Americans relied upon 77

78 80

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Helen Bradley Foster, ‘New Raiments of Self’: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 51. Ibid., 53. 79 See Chapter 13 by Colleen E. Kriger in Volume I. Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 120–30. Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 185. Ibid., 198.

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the enslavement of Africans who were violently captured, shipped, and forced to work in the Caribbean islands and the Southern United States plantations. Enslaved people planted, tended, and harvested cotton in order to build the wealth of plantation and factory owners. In 1847, Karl Marx famously noted that ‘without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry’.83 By the nineteenth century, the United States was the primary source of raw cotton for the British textile industry, and ‘king cotton’ was the fastest growing industry in the history of the world.84 Historian Beverly Lemire has described cotton as ‘one of the catalyst commodities in world history’.85 Although the production of cotton fibre in the southeastern United States was initially distant from its industrial processing, by the early 1800s, factories had spread from Britain to America and around the world by the twentieth century. Cotton factories and clothing ‘came to epitomize modernizing societies’.86 Often obscured from dominant narratives of ‘modern’ fashion is the dependence of the textile industry upon racial oppression. Racialized forms of subordination persisted after enslaved peoples were legally emancipated in 1863 in the United States. Given limited options and sustained racialized persecution after the reforms of the Reconstruction era came to an end (1877), many former enslaved people became sharecroppers, and others were driven out of the South by pogroms initiated by the Ku Klux Klan and racist groups who did not want to see them succeed economically. Migration occurred from the Southern United States to the North and Midwest, and also to California in the twentieth century. Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writer’s Project in the United States conducted approximately 2,000 oral histories of people who had formerly been enslaved. These works revealed how people ‘who did not even legally own their own bodies’ were 83

84 85

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Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847; repr., Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955), 49. Riello, Cotton, 201–3. Beverly Lemire, ‘Cotton’, in Atlantic History, Oxford Bibliographies Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Ibid.

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still able ‘to reveal themselves as individual and communal human beings by their dress’.87 Deeply ingrained West African cultural aesthetics and principles of self-presentation enabled improvisation with the limited materials and time they had to focus on their own appearances. For example, the Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC has in its collection two garments that are especially relevant: (a) a striped and piecedtogether dress of an unidentified enslaved woman, from sometime between 1840 and 1860; and (b) a handmade skirt of a six-year-old enslaved girl, Lucy Lee Shirley, dating to about 1860. The latter was originally part of a skirt-and-top ensemble made of a linen and cotton, multi-coloured and delicately patterned print fabric. Significant labour clearly went into the fine, pin-tucked skirt and the blue trim.88 A caption in the museum display indicates that enslaved adults taught children that dress was a mode of resistance through self-esteem, self-expression, and the embracement of ‘the joys life can bring’. They demonstrated how ‘a small cut of inexpensive cloth’ could be sewed into ‘fine clothing to reflect their sense of self-worth’. Whereas their work attire was generally made of coarse fabric and uniformly prescribed, both enslaved and freed African Americans were often able to express and proclaim their subjectivities in their best Sunday dress (Figure 33.5).89 Clothing scholar Gwen O’Neal has identified the Black Church as a cultural space in which dress and spirituality are inseparable, drawing on ‘religious ethics rooted in African religion and philosophy’.90 Dress norms in the Black Church connect spirituality and materiality through a ‘unity of community’ that extends back to the era of

87 88

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Foster, ‘New Raiments of Self’, 4–5. Elizabeth Chang, ‘A Humble Skirt Worn by an Enslaved Child Finds a Place in History’, Washington Post, 15 September 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/life style/magazine/a-humble-skirt-worn-by-an-enslaved-child-finds-a-place-in-his tory/2016/09/14/ee65bf62-4d2c-11e6-a422-83ab49ed5e6a_story.html (accessed 25 April 2023). Foster, ‘New Raiments of Self’, 159; Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 93. Gwen O’Neal, ‘The African American Church, Its Sacred Cosmos, and Dress’, in Arthur (ed.), Religion, Dress and the Body, 117.

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Figure 33.5 African Americans outside a Georgia church, c. 1900. From the W. E. B. Du Bois collection of photographs featuring African Americans in Georgia exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LOT 11930, no. 275 [P&P].

slavery.91 O’Neal refers to the Sunday experience as a ‘sacred cosmos’.92 Former Vogue fashion editor André Leon Talley (1948–2022) spoke of the importance of the Black Church in his love of fashion. Talley grew up in Durham, North Carolina, in the mid-twentieth century and was largely raised by his grandmother, who had an impressive wardrobe of hats and gloves that she wore to church on Sundays. He described every Sunday as a veritable fashion show and asserted: ‘Fashion has to uplift the soul.’93

91

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Gwen O’Neal, ‘African-American Aesthetic of Dress: Current Manifestations’, Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 16/4 (1998), 171. O’Neal, ‘The African American Church’, 129. Kate Novack (producer/director), The Gospel According to André (Magnolia Pictures, 2017).

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Internationally there was considerable migration from the Caribbean to North America and England. The ‘Windrush Generation’, named after the 1948 voyage of the Empire Windrush that brought one of the largest groups of AfroCaribbean migrants to England after the Second World War, became a term to refer to widespread Caribbean migration to England in the 1950s. Jamaican-born Stuart Hall (1932–2014) went to Oxford in 1951 to pursue graduate studies as part of the same historical moment. His emergent self-understanding as a diasporic subject upon arrival in England shaped his work in multi-faceted ways.94 A major figure in the development of the field of cultural studies, Hall reimagined the concept of diaspora as a ‘situated practice of interruption’.95 He theorized how diasporas are not always about returning to ‘roots’ but rather follow ‘circuitous routes’, complicated in their detours and aspirations.96 Hall refused binary positions of diasporic cultural identity, recognizing how a shared history matters in creating a sense of unification, yet ‘does not constitute a common origin’.97 Hall’s conception of diaspora breaks from models that, problematically, sustain essentialized notions of culture and ethnicity, which in turn risk marginalizing and displacing others.98 Hall understood why the myth of return holds power across diasporas. Within the African diaspora, ‘[i]t affirmed the possibility of a pride in a black identity; it made it possible to speak certain truths about slavery and colonization which had been rendered silent and invisible; and it underpinned political resistance to oppression and helped shape the compelling idea of Freedom’.99 In recognizing relational understandings, particular histories, dynamic processes of cultural 94 95

96 97

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Hall and Chen, ‘The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual’. Kobena Mercer, ‘A Sociography of Diaspora’, in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (eds.), Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 233. Hall, ‘Creolization, Diaspora, and Hybridity’. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity, Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 228. Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 441–9; Hall, ‘Creolization, Diaspora, and Hybridity’. Hall, ‘Creolization, Diaspora, and Hybridity’, 189.

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exchange, and multiple belongings, Hall engaged with diaspora as a problem space, and posited a formulation of diasporic identities that challenged static, unitary conceptions of origin and tradition. He grappled with his experience as a ‘familiar stranger’ in England and Jamaica: being intimately familiar with both places but not entirely of either, an experience he likened to double consciousness. This idea of doubleness establishes certain particularities of Black cultural life and their imbrication with, and critique of, modernity.100 Hall critiqued the idea of a singular Western modernity, and proposed that the diaspora aesthetics of the Black repertoire ‘are what the modern is’.101 Importantly, he noted how, ‘within the black repertoire, style – which mainstream cultural critics often believe to be the mere husk, the wrapping, the sugarcoating on the pill – has become itself the subject of what’s going on . . . We have worked on ourselves as the canvases of representation.’102

Style and Representation Hall’s formulation for the distinctiveness of diasporic traditions might be applied to the realm of style-fashion-dress, the triad of terms Carol Tulloch uses to encapsulate the ‘whole-and-part’ relationship of practices ‘of self-presentation across the African diaspora [that] lead to a dynamic profile of black people that undercuts misrepresentations and ethnic absolutism’.103 In other words, style becomes a source of agency, in tandem with fashion and dress. Importantly, people in the African diaspora have frequently imbued a kind of ongoing ‘cool’ or ‘freshness’ in the way they style their appearances. Historians Shane and Graham White have observed how the colours, patterns, and combinations of articles of dress have ‘revealed the polyrhythmic nature’ of African cultures; these 100 101

102 103

Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, 226. Hall, Familiar Stranger, 221; Stuart Hall, ‘What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’, in Morley and Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues, 471, emphasis added. Hall, ‘What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’, 470. Carol Tulloch, ‘Style-Fashion-Dress: From Black to Post-Black’, Fashion Theory, 14/3 (2010), 273–303; Tulloch, The Birth of Cool, 5.

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aesthetics, along with improvisation and ongoing freshness could be found in other expressions such as dance, quilting, and music.104 It is not only a matter of what one does or wears, but also how they wear it. Style resembles how Stuart Hall described processes of diasporic subjectivity: ‘unsettling, recombination, hybridization, and “cut-and-mix”’ and ‘always under construction’.105 Stylefashion-dress has played an important role in the African diaspora, as individuals have articulated between hegemonic norms and outright oppression on the one hand, and African aesthetic traditions and embodied ways of knowing on the other. This double consciousness undoubtedly contributed to the work of African diaspora designers, as well as consumers. Despite legacies of enslavement and oppression, women in the African diaspora shaped and changed American fashion, and some were able to use their fashion skills to buy their freedom or to develop their own businesses after emancipation. African American designers tended to be regarded as dressmakers and, even when creating and making innovative clothing styles for famous white women, have not received sufficient recognition for their contributions to modern fashion until fairly recently. For example, African American designers created the gowns of two First Ladies in the United States. Madam Elizabeth Keckley (1818–1907) made dresses, and became the personal modiste for Mary Todd Lincoln. Unlike many of the styles of the day in the 1860s, Keckley’s designs were elegant and streamlined in a modern way with little lace or ribbon.106 In 1953, Ann Lowe (1898–1981) designed the wedding gown for Jacqueline Bouvier, who married John F. Kennedy, before his election to the presidency of the United States. The gown bridges stunningly between modern and traditional upper-class aesthetics. Although the gown itself has circulated famously in images of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who was a fashion influencer, the name of the designer has not. 104 105

106

White and White, Stylin’, 36. Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, 447; Stuart Hall, ‘Culture, Community, Nation’, Cultural Studies, 7/3 (1993), 362. Emily Spivack, ‘The Story of Elizabeth Keckley, Former Slave-Turned-Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker’, Smithsonian Magazine, 24 April 2013, www .smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-story-of-elizabeth-keckley-formerslave-turned-mrs-lincolns-dressmaker-41112782 (accessed 25 April 2023).

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When a reporter asked Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy ‘who made the dress’ at the wedding reception, she replied ‘a colored dressmaker’. Ann Lowe had come from a family of African American designers; her mother and grandmother had created dresses for elite white women in Alabama, navigating between two worlds. Earlier, her great-grandmother had been enslaved and had a child fathered by a white plantation owner.107 Paul Gilroy articulates how ‘the primal history of modernity [could] be reconstructed from the slaves’ point of view’.108 The ‘doubleness’ of being simultaneously central to and decentred from modernity, he argues, allows for diasporic aesthetics that are both inside and outside of ‘the conventions, assumptions, and aesthetic rules which distinguish and periodize modernity’.109 Gilroy demonstrates how autobiography, as a project of selfcreation and self-liberation, helps to bridge individual styles across diasporic cultural expressions. Similarly, Tulloch theorizes the concept of ‘style narratives’, relating autobiography with styledfashioned-dressed bodies across the African diaspora. Embodied style narratives made visible through photographs, artwork, and visual ephemera (like postcards) established what Tulloch calls an ‘aesthetic of presence’, defined as ‘a technique of being to counter the aesthetics of invisibility that people of the African diaspora have had to overcome since slavery’.110 Engaging with archival materials, biography, history, and literary and cultural criticism, Tulloch’s methodology maps individual expressions of style that are intimately entangled with diasporic experience in ways that exceed national boundaries and challenge histories of marginalization and exclusion. As an example, Tulloch traces style narratives of Black modernity during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s using two diasporic cultural productions: James VanDerZee’s photograph Couple in Harlem (1932) and Malvin Gray Johnson’s painting 107

108 110

Gillian Brockell, ‘Jackie Kennedy’s Fairy-tale Wedding Dress was a Nightmare for her African American Dress Designer’, Washington Post, 28 August 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/08/28/jac kie-kennedys-fairy-tale-wedding-was-nightmare-her-african-americandress-designer/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 55. 109 Ibid., 73. Tulloch, Birth of Cool, 3.

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Self-Portrait: Myself at Work (1934).111 Tulloch reads the former – an African American couple dressed in raccoon coats, photographed with a Cadillac V-16 roadster convertible – as ‘an expression of black prowess, black wealth and black aesthetic power’.112 The couple’s ‘black glamor’ aligns with ideologies of the ‘New Negro’: ‘group determination, self-pride and the right to be an American citizen’.113 Gray Johnson’s Self-Portrait manifests Black modernity and subjectivity through an alternative mode of representation, more casual than glamorous. The painter’s bohemian style and ‘embrace of hybridity’ create an aesthetic of presence through visual autobiography.114 These visions of Black modernity are individually particular while thoroughly diasporic, offering counter-narratives to white modernity. As with Tulloch, historian of African and Caribbean material culture and dress Steeve O. Buckridge emphasizes the power of style as agency among African diasporic women in Jamaica from the time of slavery to post-emancipation, from 1760 to 1890.115 In colonial Jamaica, dress functioned as a performance space through which to express individual and communal identities, and to negotiate intertwined processes of resistance and accommodation to European cultural norms. Indeed, ambivalence, ambiguity, and tension are threads that run through scholarship on style-fashiondress in the African diaspora.116 Buckridge demonstrates the ways in which the power of style as bodily representation and survival strategy stemmed, in part, from possibilities for inversion, as ‘the semiotic process was never fully controlled by the ruling elite’.117

111

112 115 116

117

Ibid.; see Chapter 2, ‘“We Also Should Walk in the Newness of Life”: Individualized Harlem Style of the 1930s’, for both images. Ibid., 71. 113 Ibid., 74, 63. 114 Ibid., 78. Buckridge, The Language of Dress. Van Dyk Lewis, ‘Dilemmas in African Diaspora Fashion’, Fashion Theory, 7/2 (2003), 163–90; Susan B. Kaiser and Sarah Rebolloso McCullough, ‘Entangling the Fashion Subject through the African Diaspora: From Not to (K)not in Fashion Theory’, Fashion Theory, 14/3 (2010), 361–86; Leslie W. Rabine, ‘Fashionable Photography in Mid-Twentieth-Century Senegal’, Fashion Theory, 14/3 (2010), 305–30; Ford, Liberated Threads; Tulloch, Birth of Cool; Leora Farber, ‘Introduction: Asserting Creative Agencies through the Sartorial: (Re)fashioning African and African Diasporic Masculinities’, Critical Arts, 31/3 (2017), 1–17. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 78.

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In his examples, diaspora style might involve the interweaving of colonial dress with African aesthetics, or wearing the headwrap as a symbolic rejection of deculturation.118 Buckridge highlights what Gilroy terms the ‘changing same’ of African diasporic practices in his discussion of bark cloth and lacebark. Material production of these African dress customs were continued in Jamaica, but adapted to use locally available raw materials. Women dominated the thriving lacebark industry from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, when some men became involved in production.119 For Buckridge, cultural retention persisted alongside adaptation, change, and diversity across dress practices of the African diaspora; he asserts, ‘[w]hat is culturally specific among black people is the power of style’.120 Tanisha Ford explores ‘the global politics of soul’ as a means for transnational belonging across the African diaspora. Threads of stylistic belonging were central to ‘becoming modern black cultural agents’.121 For African diasporic women in particular, Ford demonstrates the ways in which defining oneself through dress represents a means of activism, an embodied challenge to racialized violence and gender inequalities. For example, the appearance of South African-born Miriam Makeba, who moved to the United States in 1959 after living briefly in England, shifted across continents, as did burgeoning interpretations of soul style. In Makeba’s early career within South Africa, her style was thoroughly modern, a ‘blend of edgy and respectable [that] destabilized notions of feminine propriety’.122 The popularity of Western clothing in South Africa during the 1950s and early 1960s created tension, associated on the one hand with modernity and liberation, and with imperialism and cultural erasure on the other.123 Given this tension, ‘Makeba represented a vision of African style and modernity that was visibly different from what passed for traditional African dress.’124 While Makeba became an icon of soul style and beauty across the African diaspora, interpretations of her appearance remained context dependent. In the United States, her short, natural hairstyle ‘began to represent a liberated African beauty 118 120 122

Ibid., 94. 119 Ibid., 50–3, 236; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 190. 121 Ford, Liberated Threads, 30. Ibid., 16. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid., 22.

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Figure 33.6 South African-born, internationally renowned singer Miriam Makeba in the RCA recording studios in New York City, c. 1965. Courtesy of Michael Ochs Archives / Stringer, Getty Images.

aesthetic for African Americans’.125 In South Africa under apartheid, given the compulsory cutting of girls’ hair in the racially segregated Bantu education system, Makeba’s choice to maintain her short hairstyle ‘challenged respectable notions of femininity’ and positioned her as a ‘cultural revolutionary’ (Figure 33.6).126 In contrast to Makeba’s choice of a short hairstyle, the forcible cutting of hair represents a technique of discipline and punishment. Understanding style as agency reinforces the radical power of appearance style to contest, subvert, and undo racialized, gendered, and class-based norms. Members of the Rastafari movement

125

Ibid., 16.

126

Ibid., 17.

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in Jamaica, which emerged in the early 1930s, rejected Eurocentric appearance standards and systems of oppression. The hairstyle of dreadlocks, for example, was seen as a direct assault on hegemonic norms. Ethiopianism and Pan-Africanism, particularly Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa project, were highly influential in shaping the Rastafari movement’s Black Nationalist perspective. The Rastafari understood themselves as the true Israelites, having been scattered by force, enslaved, and exiled in ‘Babylon’.127 The Rastafari suffered at the hands of police for espousing and embodying Black pride, harassment that included the forcible, public cutting of dreadlocks (Figure 33.7). The matted dreadlock style was first worn in Jamaica among the militant Rastafari sect, Youth Black Faith.128 The dreadlock hairstyle represented the Rastafari ethos on several levels: they aligned

Figure 33.7 Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie I greets a Rastafari delegation in Kingston, Jamaica, 1966. Courtesy of Michael Ochs Archives / Stringer, Getty Images.

127

128

Ennis B. Edmonds, Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 45. Barry Chevannes, Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean Worldviews (1995; repr., New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

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with practices of natural living; they were seen to reflect an African – rather than European – aesthetic; and they signified opposition to Jamaican norms of propriety. Dreadlocks were said to have acquired their name because they were ‘initially intended to shock and put fear in the establishment’.129 Dreads were understood to symbolize the lion’s mane (the Lion of Judah representing strength and self-confidence). Even as dreadlocks challenged Eurocentric appearance standards, the hairstyle perpetuated masculine gender bias. While some women wore locks in the early dreadlock era, they had to cover their hair at all times. Men wore their locks uncovered, though some adopted the practice of wearing knitted tams in the latter half of the 1960s in the Rastafari colours of red, gold, and green.130 However, meanings and practices changed through the years as more women adopted the dreadlock style and participated in the Rastafari movement on their own terms, amidst cultural shifts associated with struggles for women’s rights and an increasing popularity of dreads in Jamaican society. The broader impact of the Rastafari was a ‘rebellious rejection’ of the racialized Jamaican colonial system, sparking an ‘Africanization’ of Jamaican culture.131 The combination of utopian aspirations, grounded ethics, and creative expressions represents what Gilroy terms ‘the politics of transfiguration’, revealing ‘the hidden internal fissures in the concept of modernity’ and refusing binary oppositions between ethics and aesthetics, and culture and politics.132 The identification of such internal fissures in narratives of Euromodernity represents a key imperative and epistemology in diasporic thought. Diasporic thought does not simply abolish anything that does not fit into a seamless narrative, but rather foregrounds ‘displacements’ and ‘dysfunctions’.133

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Charles Price, ‘Social Change and the Development and Co-optation of a Black Antisystemic Identity: The Case of Rastafarians in Jamaica’, Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, 3/1 (2003), 24. Chevannes, Rastafari, 121. Rex M. Nettleford, Mirror Mirror: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica (1970; repr., Kingston: LMH Publishing, 2001), 103. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 38–9. 133 Hall, Familiar Stranger, 171.

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conclusion Concepts of the diaspora cannot be separated from modernity, slavery, colonization, and imperialism. Although the Jewish and African diasporas have different histories, together they point to the horrific violences associated with power and prejudice. They also highlight the creative and entrepreneurial ways of resisting, and adapting to, dominant cultures. That is, both involve the need for diasporic subjectivities that incorporate a sense of double consciousness, with all of the tensions, stresses, and creative forces associated with embodied ways of knowing. These subjectivities have shaped the course of modern fashion history and have challenged the idea that fashion equates only with Western modernity. Rather, fashion itself resembles how Hall describes the diasporic experience: ‘unsettling, recombination, hybridization, and “cutand-mix”’.134 There is simply no ‘return’ or ‘recovery’ to an ‘ancestral past’ without attention to present circumstances.135 Like style-fashion-dress, diasporic subjectivities are ‘always under construction’.136 The Jewish and African diasporas also indicate the importance of understanding intersectionalities among subject positions. For example, race and class intersected with gender to establish the dreadlock hairstyle as transgressing European norms while reinforcing ideologies of masculine superiority. Class mobility intersected with, or even trumped, diasporic identifications among the Jewish ‘Shirtwaist Kings’, when profit margins depended upon a low-cost immigrant, largely Jewish female workforce. In the twenty-first century, the scope and reach of diasporic style-fashion-dress has expanded dramatically with online retailing, personal blogging and the emergence of influencers, and social media. Fashion theorists such as Emma Tarlo and Reina Lewis have presented ethnographic research demonstrating the importance of the Internet in creating and transforming a transnational diaspora of Muslim female fashion consumers. Influencers have served both as ‘style mediators’ and ‘spiritual advisors’ with respect to modest fashion, including hijab and ways of wrapping 134 136

Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, 447. 135 Ibid., 448. Hall, ‘Culture, Community, Nation’, 362.

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headscarves.137 Hijab-wearing retailers and consumers alike on London’s high streets, as well, represent fashion identities among the British South Asian Muslim diaspora.138 Overall, the transnational Muslim diaspora opens up understandings of the ways in which the complex of style-fashion-dress becomes a vehicle for new diasporic formations, such as the Islamic faith, that do not necessarily refer to a single homeland.139 The concept of diaspora and its relation to fashion is more expansive than ever in the context of a global economy and digital media. Through fashion, diaspora involves ‘cultural remixing on the local level’, where intersectional identities connect in meaningful ways with larger transnational communities.140 The original meaning in terms of the Jewish exile from the homeland has shifted along with modernity, migration, immigration, air travel, the global economy, and digital media. The idea of a single homeland, much less the idea of a permanent return, is increasingly complicated by new technologies and possibilities for transnational travel and communities formulated, in part, through fashion.

select bibliography Anijar, Karen, ‘Jewish Genes, Jewish Jeans: A Fashionable Body’, in Linda B. Arthur (ed.), Religion, Dress, and the Body (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 181–200. Biale, David, Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York: Schocken Books, 2002). Boyarin, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, ‘Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity’, Critical Inquiry, 19/4 (1993), 693–725. Buckridge, Steeve O., The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004). Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co, 1997). Ford, Tanisha C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 137 138 140

Tarlo, Visibly Muslim; Lewis, ‘Fashion Forward and Faith-tastic!’, 50. Lewis, Muslim Fashion. 139 Tulloch, ‘Style-Fashion-Dress’. Ford, Liberated Threads, 9.

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fashioning diasporas Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Green, Nancy L. (ed.), Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Guenther, Irene, Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2004). Hall, Stuart, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017). Lewis, Van Dyk, ‘Dilemmas in African Diaspora Fashion’, Fashion Theory, 7/2 (2003), 163–90. O’Neal, Gwen, ‘The African American Church, Its Sacred Cosmos, and Dress’, in Linda B. Arthur (ed.), Religion, Dress and the Body (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 117–34. Rosman, Moshe, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Liverpool: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007). Tulloch, Carol, The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). White, Shane and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

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COLONIAL FASHION HISTORIES karen tranberg hansen

On 2 March 1940, A Grand Big Show Competition DANCE, featuring ballroom dance champions from clubs in several Copperbelt towns was held in the Railway Compound in the zinc and lead mining town, Broken Hill (today Kabwe), in what was then the British Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia).1 As was common at such events, European residents were invited to watch and to judge both the dancing and the dress. At this particular dance competition, British anthropologist Godfrey Wilson, who was conducting research on the town’s African urbanization, had invited along his wife, South African-born anthropologist Monica Wilson. An astute observer with an unusual flair for African preoccupations with dress, Godfrey Wilson asked her to ‘cover the frocks’, as she noted in a letter to her father in South Africa. Looking after their new-born baby and assisting her husband in a variety of ways, she told her father that ‘it was so nice to be doing “field work” again’.2 Aside from emphasizing the ‘intense desire’ of Africans in Broken Hill for clothing and calculating their expenditures, Wilson himself provided little detail about their evolving dress practices.3

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University of Cape Town Libraries, Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers BC 880. The B series comprise Monica Wilson’s archives. The E series contain Godfrey Wilson’s notes from Broken Hill. Flyer inserted in file BC880. E9.9, Dancing. BC880. B5.1, Letters from Monica Wilson to her father, 4 March 1940. See Karen Tranberg Hansen, ‘Urban Research in a Hostile Setting: Godfrey Wilson in Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia, 1938–1940’, Kronos, 41 (2015), 193–214.

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As a matter of fact, Monica Wilson’s coverage of ‘the frocks’ offers rare and detailed information.4 Consider the following from her characterization of women’s dresses: ‘Winner. White satin, very well cut. Cape edged with expensive fur. High heeled evening shoes. Small pale blue felt cap on the back of her head (very becoming). Red glass earrings. Partner in tails.’ Or this one: ‘Silk, trimmed with large black clubs, [a]round hem and on bodice – obviously an expensive model. Worn with black glasses, straightened hair. Almost all wore bandeaux [head-bands] of some sort.’ Turning to the men’s clothes, she notes: ‘A number (both the winners among them) in ordinary tails – quite becoming. One wore a white scarf all evening hanging down under his jacket in front. Another wore dark glasses (these two in tails). One in white cotton trousers, tail coat (much too large), green pork pie hat, in dark glasses.’ Attentive to hairstyle, she noted that Santana, the secretary of the African Dance Club visiting from Ndola, wore an ‘ordinary tweed jacket, but had hair crushed up – partly straightened’, and that some performers, both women and men, wore a ‘whiteish brown face powder’. Just like a specialist, Monica Wilson approached the materiality of dress and accessories as contributing to embody the entire fashionable gestalt of the dancers.5 Style elements from many directions converge in these descriptions, including conventional European formal evening wear but also several striking garment combinations and accessories such as dark glasses worn during a night-time event, the long white scarf and the green pork pie hat. Would intercontinental inspirations from the 1940s be at work here, when in the United States, the pork pie hat was popular among zoot-suiters and jazz musicians?6 We 4

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BC880. E9.9, Dancing. Typescript notes by Monica Wilson on frocks. African dance, 2 March 1940. Joanne B. Eicher and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins, ‘Definitions and Classifications of Dress: Implications for Analysis of Gender Roles’, in Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher (eds.), Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 13. The pork pie hat, flashy and colour-coordinated, became associated with African American culture and zoot suits during the 1940s. See Stuart Cosgrave, ‘The Zoot Suit and Style Warfare’, in Angela McRobbie (ed.), Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1998). Lester Young, jazz saxophonist from the mid-1920s to the late 1950s, regularly wore a pork pie hat when

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may not know,7 but what is readily apparent is a joyous scene of dressing well, entertainment and pleasure that is nearly erased when such dress practice is explained merely as imitation of Western dress. The timing demands notice. Britain had entered the Second World War and African men from Northern Rhodesia were conscripted to serve, as they were from many other colonies. Some of the dances Godfrey Wilson attended in Broken Hill were supported by war funds. The war years saw wage and import restrictions, no doubt curtailing the exuberance in dress hinted at above. But the post-war years marked a turning point, when gradually the ‘winds of change’ brought independence within view in many colonies, and along with it new dress practices and fashion cultures, including, in some places, attempts to establish national dress conventions and reinvent traditional wear. Meanwhile, Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ and mass production of garments conquered the fashion scene at the same time as decolonization, the beginnings of post-colonialism and increasing global cultural flows gradually transformed the former colonial world.

colonial pedigrees and saturated fashion histories Colonialism was the dominant relationship of European powers to local populations across most of the globe from the time of the discovery of the Americas until the post-Second World War period. Combining a variety of geo-political strategies with economic motives in governing local societies, colonial rule in settler

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performing. After his death, the composer Charles Mingus wrote an elegy for him titled, ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, https://culturedarm.com/behind-thestory-charles-mingus-goodbye-pork-pie-hat (accessed 30 March 2020). African American influenced jazz music was popular in South Africa and would have been listened to at the mines and in towns by migrants from Northern Rhodesia. African American minstrel music and gospel introduced in the beginning of the twentieth century shaped the sounds of South African jazz that developed through the 1930s and on. See Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); Gwen Ansell, Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music and Politics in South Africa (London: Continuum, 2004).

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societies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand from the 1780s until settler independence towards the end of the nineteenth century continued the subjection of local populations. The time range includes around three centuries in South America until the first quarter of the 1800s and, by comparison, the ‘short’ century in Africa from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, with a few exceptions such as South Africa. In-between ranges include India, several countries in the Middle East, Asia, Indonesia, and the Pacific. In some countries in the Middle East, Indonesia, parts of India and North, West, and East Africa colonists had to contend with long-established Muslim populations.8 While the defining features of colonialism everywhere were political and economic, they were also material and they had enormous social and cultural consequences. Textiles and clothing were central to trade and colonial encounters from Asia across the Pacific to the Americas and Africa as they were subsequently in commerce and production, in Europe as well as in the colonies.9 Depending on time and place, traders, missionaries, and settlers became important actors in colonial projects. The colonizers brought with them a distinct set of beliefs based on understandings of rank and power, and gender and behaviour on notions of ‘race’ and civilization, often influenced by Christian religious values. In keeping with the evolutionary thinking of the times, clothing, and lack of it, served as a marker of civilization and a visual referent for the construction of difference. Local people were sometimes coerced into adopting European dress conventions, while at other times they actively sought to acquire new garments. Still, local clothing norms influenced the use of introduced cloth and the wearing of European dress in many ways, resulting in selective incorporations of trade goods and finished garments, dramatically transforming some of them in the process. 8

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British colonial administrators in several parts of Africa tried not to interfere directly in the religious lives and dress practices of Muslim populations. See Marie Grace Brown, Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). On the history of textile imports into pre-colonial West Africa, see Robert DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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Such changes in dress styles that turn clothes into fashion may be new and fleeting yet they also leave traces of history and links to the past.10 Scholarship from the turn of the last century and onwards focusing on materiality is challenging the ‘before and after narrative’ of submission to colonial Western dress norms in ways that are complicating the story of resilience versus change in local dress cultures and dress practice. The alternative to this understanding of dress, notes art historian Ruth Phillips in her work on the self-fashioning of First Nations people in Canada, ‘is not a generalized invocation of hybridity. Rather we need to think of dress as historically situated, individually nuanced and motivated by a desire to maintain boundaries and identities.’ It is the ‘mixture itself’, she elaborates, that ‘is normative. It is not the hybrid that is anomalous, but rather the occasional moments of apparent fusion and homogeneity that in the past have been constituted as essential expressions of culture.’11 Observations from Oceania by anthropologist Margaret Jolly complement and extend this view. ‘We need to go beyond these ideologically charged [either/or] antinomies and pursue a both/and approach.’ She advocates writing a history that is ‘saturated’. Her approach ‘imagines a cloth which is imbued with both indigenous and exogenous values, impregnated with continuity and rupture and saturated with ongoing struggles about embodied gendered persons and sensuous, beautiful things’.12 Works from the Pacific have focused in particular on surfaces, the decomposing and reassembling of materials that prompt recognition and identification by association and affect what people do with clothing, creating new styles and designs in 10

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For this acknowledgement of fashion’s conservative role, see Joanne Finkelstein, Fashion: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 5–6. 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), 151, 152. Margaret Jolly, ‘A Saturated History of Christianity and Cloth in Oceania’, in Hyaeweol Choi and Margaret Jolly (eds.), Divine Domesticities: Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2014), 454.

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ways that work out differently across the region.13 When we add anthropologist Nina Sylvanus’ notion of materiality as ‘dense’ to these observations about surface work, layers and saturation, we bring the agentive power of materiality of cloth/clothing to the fore and help capture the effects of its continuously shifting layers. Her work on wax cloth and dress practice in Togo, West Africa, has shown this aspect with great insight, demonstrating how the rich material and semiotic quality of cloth helps dress come alive, bringing joy, creating story, generating desire, in short having agency.14 Away from the West, the use of Western dress, also referred to as European, expatriate, or introduced, has been a fraught topic. For a long time, scholarship on textiles and dress was almost oblivious to the social and cultural significance of local interactions with the West’s clothing. Anthropologists, museum specialists, and art historians are in part to blame for this due to their long-established focus on disappearing cultural traditions and hostile stance towards the global spread of mass consumption and its assumed adverse effects on local cultures.15 ‘In general, the adoption of expatriate cloth and clothing has not been discussed in relation to Melanesia’, notes anthropologist Lissant Bolton when writing about dress in Vanuatu in the southwestern Pacific.16 During his three periods of fieldwork in the highlands of New Guinea between the late 1970s and 1990 anthropologist Michael O’Hanlon ‘treated the final stages of the adoption of non-indigenous clothing (mainly secondhand Western clothing) as an unremarkable local instance of a phenomenon affecting indigenous people everywhere’.17

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See Chloe Colchester (ed.), Clothing the Pacific (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Küchler and Were (eds.), The Art of Clothing. Nina Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 11–16. Karen Tranberg Hansen, Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 5. Lissant Bolton, ‘Dressing for Transition: Weddings, Clothing and Change on Vanuatu’, in Küchler and Were (eds.), The Art of Clothing, 26. O’Hanlon adds that it took Hansen’s work on the second-hand clothes trade in Zambia to alert him ‘to the potential anthropological interest in the topic’. See Michael O’Hanlon, ‘Under Wraps: An Unpursued Avenue of Innovation’, in Küchler and Were (eds.), The Art of Clothing, 63.

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What is at stake here is less the process of introduction than the results: what colonized people did to and with the new garments, regardless of their source. Dress everywhere was always a changing practice that remakes itself in interaction with other styles, among them Western-styled garments, from an increasingly global fashion system. Historian Robert Ross captures this well in his global account of the relationship between dress and imperialism, which he explains in broad strokes as an exploration of the spread of whatever was at the time standard Western dress and insisting that both adoption and rejection were always a political practice.18 This chapter sketches a sense of the global character and development of colonialism’s fashion history as well as seeking to bring different dress projects and clothing cultures into view. The material turn in recent dress scholarship approaches the study of colonial fashion by collapsing restricting binaries, revealing how different dress practices draw on each other for inspiration, in this way mobilizing diverse outcomes. In turn, this approach explores, not a single colonial fashion history, but rather the entanglements of several fashion histories from across the former colonial world. The chapter presents a selection of snapshots and close-ups inspired by scholarship on Africa, my region of specialization, with a view to exploring parallel or comparable situations from other colonial contexts. For reasons of space, I cannot deal with the trade and production histories that were central to colonial clothing provision or the ways colonial inspirations were incorporated into design in the metropoles.19 Throughout, my focus is on Western clothing, its role, usages, meanings, and place in local wardrobes and its changing interactions with local ways of dressing. Even with shifts in current explanatory trends, a persistent bias in much current dress scholarship against serious engagement with the West’s clothes when worn away from the West curtails our understanding of creativity and innovation in global dress and fashion practices.

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Robert Ross, Clothing: A Global History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). Ibid. For France’s African colonies, see Victoria L. Rovine, ‘Colonialism’s Clothing: Africa, France, and the Deployment of Fashion’, Design Issues, 25/ 3 (2009), 44–61.

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fashion genealogies Colonial clothing encounters were both material and corporeal. Two processes, in particular, helped introduce dress practice inspired by the West across the colonial world: missionization on the one hand, and wage labour, urban living, and education on the other. Encouraging modesty and hygiene as part of conversion efforts, many missionary societies introduced local people to Western-styled garments and imported textiles. The styles of dress and the clothing practices that resulted did not always turn out as anticipated by missionaries but were influenced as much by local people themselves, who selectively incorporated garments and apparel. Across the colonial world, clothing became a referent in narratives about race, gender, social inequality, and in the longer term about national development. We begin in southern Africa that was settled by Europeans in the mid-seventeenth century. During the 1850s and onwards in South West Africa (today Namibia), migrants from across the region and beyond, including Africans of different ethnic backgrounds, mixedrace people, and white settlers introduced local Herero groups to new commodities and ideas. The development of diamond and gold mining in South Africa in the 1870s and 1880s increased exposure to consumption, mediated by the growing involvement of men in migrant labour. South West Africa came under German colonial control in 1884. Violent struggles with the Germans in the early 1900s decimated the Herero population, pushing some to neighbouring Angola and Botswana. By the end of the First World War, German colonial rule was succeeded by South African control, and not until 1990 did South West Africa achieve political independence as Namibia. The war left behind a troubled history that includes traces in dress style and practice, among them, Herero men’s military-style uniforms and women’s Victorian-style dresses. Visually striking, these dress styles contain many historical layers and point as well to the construction of ethnic minority identities in the new nation. The men’s uniforms, inspired by those of German soldiers, include jackets and hats of the type worn by the military and police, accessorized with epaulettes and hatbands. As early as the midnineteenth century the wife of the first German missionary to

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central Namibia had opened a school to teach Herero women dressmaking skills. Long before mass conversion to Christianity at the end of the century, Herero women eagerly adopted floorlength gowns in the new style. Anthropologist Hildi Hendrickson speculates that the early acceptance of the dress reflected the high demand for cut-and-sewn clothing as a trade commodity across the region in general.20 The so-called long dress is constructed from several pieces: bodice, sleeves, skirt, numerous petticoats, sometimes an apron and a shawl, and a spectacular headdress. The bodice is high-necked and worn with voluminous skirts lavishly gathered from a high waist or below the bust, supported by several petticoats, requiring a minimum of ten metres of fabric.21 The preferred fabric is imported heavy cotton in a single colour or brightly coloured prints. The sleeves are puffed from the shoulders or frilled at the wrists. Matching scarves may be worn around the neck. The details and embellishments of the long dress have changed in several respects, among them the head-covering that originally was a scarf. The most distinctive feature of the dress is a headwrap folded horizontally from several metres of cloth to look like cow horns. Wearing this headwrap, women pay respect to the Herero historical mainstay, cattle breeding. Making all women look wide, this style of dress has two associations according to Hendrickson, one with the pregnant figure and the other with the horned profile and graceful movement of cattle.22 Deborah Durham, another anthropologist who has examined the long dress, in this case among Hereros in Botswana, has highlighted the embodied experience and the body habitus of the wearing of the heavy dress. The dress is a ‘form of practice’, she suggests, ‘a burdensome constraint and also a sensible source of agentive autonomy’.23 Worn by adult women, the dress ‘marks women as social persons who represent Herero history and identity to the community and the wider world’.24 20

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Hildi Hendrickson, ‘The “Long” Dress and the Construction of Herero Identities in Southern Africa’, African Studies, 52/2 (1994), 45–6. Ibid., 28. 22 Ibid., 31. Deborah Durham, ‘The Predicament of Dress: Polyvalency and the Ironies of Cultural Identity’, American Ethnologist, 26/2 (1999), 391–3. Hendrickson, ‘The “Long” Dress’, 26–7.

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Today Herero people consider uniforms and long dresses to be traditional, reminders of their shared history. While many, like most other Namibians, wear mass-produced Western-styled clothing as everyday wear, adult men proudly dress in uniforms and adult women in long dresses for ceremonies of remembrance for the heroes of the colonial period and other cultural occasions. Troop parades led by men in uniforms include military-style drilling with women marching behind in a line, often wearing a special jacket on top of their long dress.25 While men wear uniforms mainly at special events, in the capital, Windhoek, Herero women reserve the long dress for special occasions (Figure 34.1). But in small-town everyday life, many women wear long dresses in a variety of colours and printed fabrics. One of their preferred textiles is blue isishweshwe, the German produced cotton textile Blaudruck, that was worn as early as the

Figure 34.1 Herero women wearing ‘long’ dresses during troop parade in Swakopmund, Namibia, 1995. Photo by Karen Tranberg Hansen.

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Hildi Hendrickson, ‘Bodies and Flags: The Representation of Herero Identity in Colonial Namibia’, in H. Hendrickson (ed)., Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 217–23.

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1850s by German settlers and Herero women.26 In the late 1980s when Hendrickson conducted her research, young women were reluctant to begin wearing the long dress. Not only is it cumbersome to wear because of its weight, but it is also a challenge to keep clean and costly to acquire. Concealing most of their bodies, it reminds young women of motherhood and reproduction.27 Nearly twenty years later, when writer and photographer Catherine McKinley reported on the long dress, such attitudes were changing. She noted a general turn to earlier styles of tailoring, with the ‘younger generation blinging it up [sic], too. The volume of the dress had grown – not the layering of petticoats, but the choice of wider dresses, shinier . . . materials, imported from India and China and Dubai . . . More embroidery work, appliqué, and lace or lurex. The jewellery was flashier.’28 The stereotype of the mission-imposed dress has been effectively unsettled in anthropological work in the Pacific over the last decade or longer. Margaret Jolly reminds us how foreign observers in ‘a lineage from early twentieth-century travellers to late twentiethcentury feminists’, have ‘satirized and deplored’ forms of women’s clothing introduced by missionaries across Oceania.29 In fact, most scholars who work on clothing in the region insist on the agency of islanders rather than on missionary imposition and examine how island people have used both traditional cloth and introduced textiles to negotiate their identity. Lissant Bolton explains that Christians in Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides), an archipelago in the southwestern Pacific, eagerly adopted introduced clothing, and that women’s agency and religious and ethnic identity became part of the art of sewing and wearing the new clothes. Vanuatu was administered jointly by the British and the French from 1906 to 1980, and islanders were exposed to different missions that influenced women’s clothing, Presbyterians preferring converts in 26

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Juliette Leeb-du Toit, Isishweshwe: A History of the Indigenisation of Blueprint in Southern Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZuluNatal Press, 2017), 234–5. Hendrickson, ‘The “Long” Dress’, 44–5. Catherine E. McKinley with photographs by Thabiso Sekgala, ‘It’s All about the Cow: Namibian Women and the Politics of Haute Fashion’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 89/3 (2013), 160. Jolly, ‘Saturated History’, 443.

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dresses and Anglicans introducing blouses and dresses.30 Conversion was a slow process and introduced clothing was not immediately or exclusively adopted but often worn, as Jolly notes, ‘layered and creolised with indigenous clothes’.31 During the mobilization for independence in the 1970s, the evolving island dress (aelan dress in the local language), a loose gown reaching below the knee, took shape and new meanings. Women in Vanuatu describe island dresses as ‘our own way of dressing’ although they are well aware that they dressed differently before the Europeans arrived. Deeply incorporated into local dress practice, the dresses ‘no longer seem to be something from the outside’ but are identified as kastom. Soon after Vanuatu gained independence in 1980, island dresses were designated as women’s national dress. As women work around the limitations of the available fabrics with their aesthetic concerns, innovations continue, for example, the adoption of the colours of the national and provincial flags and new decorative details, changing the overall look.32 The association of island dress with motherhood and kastom does not go uncontested. Like in the Herero case, a younger generation of women is seeking freedom from confining styles of dress and restricting morality. Redefining what looking good means many prefer to wear trousers (long, loose surf shorts) rather than the island dress, and not without causing controversy. With an ambivalent love/hate relationship to the island dress, young women consider it to be for mothers only, and they wear it mainly for church and other special occasions.33 Requiring several metres of fabric, the island dress is also costly compared to other clothes, for example, ‘relatively high-quality secondhand clothing for work or special occasions and cheaply made boardshorts and t-shirts from Chinatown for stylish everyday wear’.34 30 32 33

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Bolton, ‘Dressing for Transition’, 23. 31 Jolly, ‘Saturated History’, 443. Bolton, ‘Dressing for Transition’, 26. Maggie Cummings, ‘The Trouble with Trousers: Gossip, Kastom, and Sexual Culture in Vanuatu’, in Leslie Butt and Richard Eves (eds.), Making Sense of AIDS: Culture, Sexuality and Power in Melanesia (Honululu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 134. Maggie Cummings, ‘Looking Good: The Cultural Politics of the Island Dress for Young Women in Vanuatu’, The Contemporary Pacific, 25/1 (2013), 47.

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In Lifou on the Loyalty Islands in New Caledonia, Kanak women adopted the robe mission (mission robe) during the French administration, turning this garment of missionary origin into their own.35 In the process, a variety of elements have coalesced, resulting in changes in style and presentation as well as in the use and distribution of the dress. Until the mid-1990s, the robe mission, described by anthropologist Anna Paini, was the monopoly of Chinese tailoring workshops in the capital.36 Made from imported lightweight cotton gauze, the dress reaches below the calf. In the 1980s and 1990s, it had buttons at the front and back. Innovations such as a side pocket to hold keys or a mobile phone have since been added. Changing colour and preferences in print fabrics influence dress fashions. A versatile garment, the mission robe was adopted by cricket players, the women’s leading national sport. Regardless of stylistic innovations, the robe persists as a mode of dress. Its use has expanded, as teenagers and young women have begun wearing it on important occasions.37 With creativity, imagination, and taste, a new cohort of women has been establishing small tailoring ateliers, centred on the production of the robe mission, which is worn widely at special events such as marriages and funerals. With novel elements, the robe mission has become Kanak women’s dress not only in Lifou but also across the country, where both younger and older women ‘acknowledge it as a symbol of pride’.38 Designing, manufacturing, and marketing the dress themselves, women entrepreneurs have helped change the perception of the mission dress. Re-signifying a colonial object into a cultural one, Karnak women have transformed the robe mission into an inter-island and inter-confessional cultural object. With its ‘deep-rooted sense of place’, the dress also expresses ‘a mobile interplay with other times, places and people’.39

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Anna Paini, ‘Redressing Materiality: Robes Missions from “Colonial” to “Cultural” Object, and Entrepreneurship of Kanak Women in Lifou’, in Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone and Anna Paini (eds.), Tides of Innovation in Oceania: Value, Materiality and Place (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2017), 139–78. Ibid., 162. 37 Ibid., 162, 166. 38 Ibid., 170. 39 Ibid., 172.

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dress moves Numerous influences during the colonial period shaped developments of dress practice, including labour migration to farms, mines, and urban areas that turned subject people into wage earners and consumers who took keen interest in obtaining consumer goods, among them clothing. Education, initially mission sponsored, increased their exposure. For a long time, scholarship paid more attention to the changing dynamics of indigenous dress than to the clothing practices that developed in the wake of European settlement and immigration at the turn of the twentieth century and onwards. But if scholars have been indifferent to the use of the West’s garments by non-Westerners, colonized people themselves put new styles of dress creatively on the historical map, wearing them with gusto. In South America from the colonial period and onwards, influences in dress and dance have come together in tango, turning the dance and its changing fashions into a global cultural export. With roots in a combination of African, European, and native Argentinian dance, tango arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the urban slums of port cities in Argentina and Uruguay among African slave descendants and immigrants from Eastern Europe, Spain, and Italy. During the first decades of the twentieth century, young men from Argentina and Uruguay introduced the tango in dance halls in Europe, prompting a craze first in Paris, then Vienna, London, Berlin, and New York. In the process, the dance shed its low-class reputation.40 Tango fashions developed from everyday clothing to the sexually provocative and body revealing dress styles stereotypically attributed to dancers today. Drawing on photographs, playwright and tango specialist Christine Dennison describes how in the early twentieth century working men in Buenos Aires wore black jackets, sometimes with a white trim, striped, grey trousers, a white scarf tied at the neck, and a black hat, in fact the types of clothes they wore on an everyday basis. Women wore floor- or ankle-length 40

This overview draws on Marilyn G. Miller’s online exclusive, ‘Tango’, in Margot Blum Schevill (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of Dress and Fashion, Vol. 2: Latin America (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

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dresses with draping or wrap effects. She notes that during the tango craze in Europe, fashions changed to accommodate the passion for dancing. Corsets became flexible or were abandoned and skirts became softer. During the golden age of the tango in the 1920s, a well-dressed fashionable man wore a suit, and so he did when dancing the tango. Women’s dresses changed continuously, from loose styles of the 1930s, to Hollywood-inspired gowns and ‘New Look’ silhouettes after the Second World War.41 After the coup in Argentina in 1955, the tango went underground but has since experienced a renaissance. Developing from its colonial background in the immigrant slums, the tango with its machismo suits and sexually provocative dresses has crossed many borders, including film and fiction, to become a spectacular global performance style.42 With a majority population of African background, Brazil developed dress cultures, inspired both by African and European dress, that differed from the rest of South America. For most of the colonial period, Africans and mixed-race people were enslaved as the slave trade was not outlawed until 1850 and the practice of slavery persisted until 1888.43 As a result, in the twenty-first century, Brazil contains the largest population of African origin outside of Africa, especially in the northeast where intensive sugar and tobacco plantations once operated. According to dress scholar Kelly Mohs Gage, Afro-Brazilian women’s distinctive dress, the traje de crioula (creole dress) is an ‘amalgam of European and African dress attributes’.44 ‘Whether by force or by choice’, she notes, ‘slave women dressed very similarly to their mistresses’ in bodices, long skirts, shawls and jackets, made mostly from wool or cotton fabrics, especially calico (printed cotton), and headdresses, often wrapped as turbans.45 A specific type of shawl, the pano da costa (coastal cloth), was either imported to Brazil from Africa, or

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Christine Denniston, The Meaning of Tango: The Story of the Argentinian Dance (London: Portico Books, 2007), 189–90. Kathy Davis, Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World (New York: New York University Press, 2013). Kelly Mohs Gage, ‘Forced Crossing: The Dress of African Slave Women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1861’, Dress, 39/2 (2013), 116. Ibid., 130. 45 Ibid., 115, 123.

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referenced a range of African locations. Beaded necklaces and jewellery accessorized the dress.46 Twentieth-century changes and regional dress differences resulted in the development of the Bahian dress, traje de baiana, associated with market women selling foodstuffs and crafts, and a variety of secular and ritual activities, chief among them the Candomblé, a syncretic religion of West African and Catholic elements. Candomblé performances fuse rhythmic dance and drumming, while the white lace dresses retaining historical characteristics of the dress of slave and free women of colour mediate expressions of faith and pleasure.47 A spectacular contribution to the historical tourist scene today, the voluminous gathered skirt, supported by petticoats and/or stays, made from lacy white fabric points to nineteenth-century European fashions, while the headdress hints at African antecedents (Figure 34.2).48 Over the years, the traje da baiana has influenced popular culture and fashion, for example, the singer Carmen Miranda wore a version of it in 1939, as did Brazilian contestants in the national costume parts of Miss Universe competitions.49 Although dressing up and dancing were widespread colonial pastimes, leisure activities did not inspire much scholarly enquiry. Ballroom dancing and its dress practice appears to have been popular across the southern African region and probably elsewhere as well. Other than the brief snapshot drawn from archival notes I offered from Northern Rhodesia at the outset, I have not come across any serious engagement with the colonial era’s changing

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Aline T. Monteiro Damgaard, a specialist in visual and material culture, examines nineteenth-century visual representations alongside rare surviving garments (fourteen skirts identified as creole clothing) held in the Museu de Traje e do Textil de Salvador, one of Brazil’s most important textile collections. See ‘Traje de Crioula: Representing Nineteenth-Century AfroBrazilian Dress’, in Charlotte Nicklas and Annebelle Pollen (eds.), Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 65–80. See Paulo Pereira Lima, ‘Candomblé and Its Living Garments’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2014). Gage suggests an Arabic background for the headdress. Gage, ‘Forced Crossing’, 123. Damgaard, ‘Traje de Crioula’.

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Figure 34.2 Women in traje de baiana and the author as tourist in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, 2002. Author’s collection.

ballroom dress practice.50 To be sure, in the post-Second World War era dance styles changed and so did dress. Scholarly interests shifted as well, exploring leisure in relation to the changing political and social setting thus presenting a wider range of positions expressed by the varying fashion scene. The capital of colonial French West Africa, Dakar in Senegal, the ‘Paris of Africa’, has a long reputation for elegance and fashionability. Historian Dior Konaté explains how women used fashion to show their support to the Bloc Africain, a political movement that mobilized colonized people across French West Africa, in a campaign for the vote for African 50

Alida Green, ‘Passionate Competitions: The Foundation of Competitive Ballroom Dancing in South Africa (1920s–1930s)’, Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, 5/1(2009), 123–43. Ballroom dancing is mentioned in passing in works on popular music in the region; see David B. Coplan, ‘The African Musician and the Development of the Johannesburg Entertainment Industry, 1900–1960’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 5/2 (1979), 129–30; and Thomas Turino, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 146–8. None of these works discuss dress practice.

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women in 1945.51 Expressing their growing political involvement, women adopted a dress they called the robe bloc, wearing it at political meetings from the 1940s into the 1950s. When demonstrating and engaging in political activity, women would wear the dress, which was long and red, the colour of the Bloc Africain, and new spectacular coiffures.52 Both Dior Konaté and Leslie Rabine describe the transformation of the robe bloc from political dress into a fashion garment among urban women during the late 1940s and 1950s when war-related import restrictions on fabrics and consumer goods were withdrawn. Rabine explains how dressmakers made innovations in the style of the colonial missionary influenced high-waisted loose dress, the ndoket (camisole), decorating its surfaces with embellishments and trim, making the bodice more form fitting and using lots of fabric in its construction. One style from 1948 had a dropped waist, perhaps, speculates Rabine, inspired by Dior’s ‘New Look’ of 1947.53 ‘European in its design, yet local in conceptualization’,54 the robe bloc reflected a new political consciousness and selfconfidence.55 Angola remained a ‘Portuguese territory’ until 1975 when a protracted guerrilla struggle that began in the early 1960s resulted in independence. Describing how young Angolans strategically employed dress to carve out space for participation, historian Marissa Moorman casts revealing light on the entangled relationship 51

52 53 54 55

Dior Konaté, ‘Women, Clothing, and Politics in Senegal in the 1940s–1950s’, in Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (eds.), Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 224. The Bloc Africain was headed by Lamine Gueye, the political mentor of Leopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s future president, who in 1948 formed the first mass political party, the Bloc Démocratique Senégalais. See Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 50–3. Leslie Rabine names the dress for the Bloc Africain in one publication, ‘Dressing up in Dakar’, L’Esprit Créateur, 37/1 (1997), 103, while in another publication, ‘Fashionable Photography in Mid-TwentiethCentury Senegal’, Fashion Theory, 14/3 (2010), 308–9, she attributes the emergence of the robe bloc to the mobilization for Senghor’s party. Konaté, ‘Women, Clothing, and Politics’, 236. Ibid., 224; Rabine, ‘Fashionable Photography’, 308. Konaté, ‘Women, Clothing, and Politics’, 235. Rabine, ‘Fashionable Photography’, 308.

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between local and imported dress styles. Even in a context of marked repression of political and cultural activity in late colonial Luanda, the capital, young Angolans used dress, dance, and music to imagine their new nation. While colonial policy promoted Portuguese dress and denigrated African clothing as quaint or folkloric, older women from the urban elite, bessanganas, dressed quite distinctly in several layers of panos (wrappers) on top of a long-sleeved blouse along with a smaller pano headwrap. Younger women wore European-style dress, often with a pano wrapper around the waist, and a headscarf. The young women who used panos with miniskirts or European dress in the 1970s ‘nodded to the bessanganas’ style as uniquely Angolan while also adopting it. By neither dismissing it as archaic nor reproducing it layer by layer, these young women demonstrated a new symbol of Angolan womanhood that was both local and ‘worldly’.56 Young Angolans reached beyond the colonial horizon with local fashions and cultural activities that expressed both their difference and cosmopolitan outlook.57 Inspired by cultural styles and ideas circulating throughout the wider world and putting them together with local references, their cosmopolitan self-styling helped define a national identity. Using local instruments and dress they performed American-style tap dancing and songs of Carmen Miranda in the dance halls of Luanda during the 1940s and 1950s.58 This local scene included fashions associated with rock ’n’ roll in the United States and Europe as well as bell-bottomed trousers, shirts with huge collars, big sunglasses and ‘Afro’ hair.59 They ‘dressed and coifed themselves’, Moorman explains, ‘in the image of film heroes both white and African-American in order to more clearly express who they were and how they were Angolan. They embraced their education, their European-style dress, and their grandparents’ panos in the same gesture.’60 When political and cultural activities were banned during the early 1960s, young women, as described above, adopted panos on top of their European-style dress, proclaiming their sense 56

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Marissa Moorman, ‘Putting on a Pano and Dancing Like Our Grandparents: Nation and Dress in Late Colonial Luanda’, in Jean Allman (ed.), Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 88. Ibid., 85. 58 Ibid., 84. 59 Ibid., 94–5. 60 Ibid., 98.

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of an urban Angolan-ness.61 Their quotidian self-styling, ‘gave them a lived experience of independence which made political sovereignty both imaginable and desirable’.62

genealogies of circulation and dispersal Few fashion garments of colonial origin have received as much attention in recent scholarship and media as the spectacularly constructed outfits made from colourful factory printed textiles, usually referred to as African prints, which are a visually striking element in public space throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. Machine-made and initially manufactured in Europe for colonial export, factory printed textiles did not attract the attention of art historians and dress scholars until the 1980s when they began to appear in the literature and museum exhibitions showcased them.63 They invite highlighting in this chapter, even if briefly, because of their trans-historical circulation and cross-cultural dispersal in processes that help offset Eurocentric colonial fashion histories and continue to develop remarkable global twists and turns. Literature and film scholar Manthia Diawara has coined a truly apt term, transtextuality, for this process.64 Printed cloth has a centuries-old history in Africa, introduced as a desirable commodity in the maritime trade between Europe, Asia, and America. Today, one of the most well known of these fabrics is probably ‘Dutch wax’, often simply called wax, with the brand name Vlisco, established in 1846 by Dutch textile manufacturers to look like Indonesian batik cloth, using a wax-resist 61 63

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Ibid. 62 Ibid. Art historian John Picton has pioneered the study of the history of African textile design. See ‘Introduction. Technology, Tradition and Lurex: The Art of Textiles in Africa’, in John Picton (ed.), Technology, Tradition and Lurex: The Art of Textiles in Africa (Barbican Art Gallery; London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1995), 9–30; Suzanne Gott, Kristyne Loughran, Betsy D. Quick, and Leslie Rabine (eds.), African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum, UCLA, 2017); Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation. Manthia Diawara, ‘Independence Cha Cha: The Art of Yinka Shonibare’, in Jaap Guldemond and Gabriele Mackert with Barbera van Kooij (eds.), Yinka Shonibare: Double Dutch (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam and Kunsthalle Wien; Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2004), 23.

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printing technique on both cloth faces. West Africa proved to be a better market than the Dutch East Indies and the fabric was subsequently designed for export to that region, proving immensely popular among market traders and consumers. The Vlisco archives demonstrate that fabrics with different designs also were produced for traders on the East African coast from 1884 onwards.65 In southern Africa, Blauprint, an indigo dyed printed cotton cloth, today known by the Zulu name isisheshwe, was imported from Europe, mainly Germany. As noted earlier, Herero women in the eastern parts of Namibia and across the border to Botswana continue to use this textile in their long dress. It has been produced in the Eastern Cape since the 1970s by Da Gama Textiles in bright colours and styles and is considered by some to be South Africa’s national cloth.66 Dominating the print fabric market in East Africa from 1950 to 1981, Japanese manufacturers worked with local trading houses and residents to canvas women’s tastes and create new designs.67 By then, less expensive than wax prints, the so-called fancy prints had become popular, printed with a roller on one face of the fabric. Preceding or following independence in most of sub-Saharan Africa, textile manufacturing factories were established to produce printed fabrics, referred to by different local names, worn and loved as emblems of tradition.68 Many of these factories have not survived turn-ofthe-last century market liberalization, and today China is the main source of the printed fabrics available across Africa.69 As Sylvanus has vividly demonstrated from Togo, the African-ness of these textiles is produced in the context of consumption, where the

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Picton, ‘Introduction’, 28. Leeb-du Toit, Ishishweswhe, 133–60, 234–5. MacKenzie Moon Ryan, ‘Designed by Resident Indian Traders, Consumed by East African Women: Japanese Dominance in Imported Kanga Production, 1950–1981’, paper presented at the conference on Dressing Global Bodies: Clothing Cultures, Politics and Economies in Globalizing Eras, c. 1500–1900, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 7–9 July 2016. See Karen Tranberg Hansen, ‘“Our Dress”: Chitenge as Zambia’s National Fabric’, in Heike Jenß and Viola Hofmann (eds.), Fashion and Materiality: Cultural Practices in Global Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Nina Sylvanus, ‘Real Fakes: Brands, Labels and China in West Africa’, in Gott et al. (eds.), African-Print Fashion Now!, 109.

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love of surfaces and fabrics, assemblage, and spectacular and competitive display give local meaning to dress practice.70 Art historian John Picton’s extensive work on the history of African printed textiles explains how designs moved from Indonesia to markets in West Africa. The surface patterns of the designs animating these printed fabrics made them particularly attractive in Africa.71 Although produced in Europe, the colour and design combinations captured African tastes. Favourite designs were named and keep being reproduced. The image of one of these, the ‘Hands and Fingers’, a design from the early 1900s, depicting the palm of a hand with twelve pennies, is based on a proverb from Ghana: ‘The palm of the hand is sweeter than the back of the hand’.72 This design is still produced by Vlisco in the Netherlands, and also made in Ghana, Nigeria, and China.73 I purchased a variation in an outdoor market in southern Tanzania in 2009 where the trader told me that it was produced by a Tanzanian textile factory (Figure 34.3). In 2010 the Vlisco group was acquired by Actis, a London-based private equity firm investing in emerging markets, and is seeking to position itself as a luxury brand.74 Vlisco collaborates with African fashion designers and operates three Africa-based subsidiaries, Ghana Textiles Printing (GTP), and Woodin in Ghana targeting the youth market and Uniwax in the Côte d’Ivoire, aimed at mid-level consumers.75 Reframing itself as a global brand, Vlisco is entering the fields of Western fashion, art, and design. Discussing this trend, fashion scholar Danielle Bruggeman points to the

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Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation. John Picton, ‘Notes on Fashioning Arts across Africa’, in Gott et al. (eds.), African-Print Fashion Now!, 19. John Picton, ‘Colonial Pretense and African Resistance, or Subversion Subverted: Commemorative Textiles in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Okwui Enwezor (ed.), The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 160. Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation, 71. Suzanne Gott and Kristyne Loughran, ‘Vlisco: Rebranding into Fashion’, in Gott et al. (eds.), African-Print Fashion Now!, 208–9. Actis was formed in 2004 as a spinout from the former Commonwealth Development Corporation, an organization established in 1948 by the British government to invest in developing economies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Ibid., 205.

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Figure 34.3 ‘Hands and Fingers’ design on textile purchased in southern Tanzania, 2009. Author’s collection.

collaboration with Dutch fashion designers, Viktor & Rolf, who used Vlisco colours and floral prints to construct large, sculpted flowers in their 2015 spring/summer haute couture collection ‘Van Gogh Girls’.76 In this case, Vlisco’s performance of Dutchness draws on multiple historical layers of cross-cultural dynamics to reappropriate the fabric as Dutch. When designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, artistic director of Dior, selected Marrakech as location for her Dior Resort 2020 collection, she used the ‘melting-pot-fabric’ of wax to connect the heritage of 76

Danielle Bruggeman, ‘Vlisco: Made in Holland, Adorned in West Africa, (Re)appropriated as Dutch Design’, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, 4/2 (2017), 197–8, 202.

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Dior and African craftsmanship.77 Consulting among many others anthropologist Anne Grosfilley, an African textiles specialist, Chiuri commissioned the Vlisco subsidiary, Abidjan-based Uniwax, to create a wax print fabric to use throughout the collection.78 She also enlisted Abidjan-based designer Pathé Ouédraogo, aka Pathé’O, originally from Burkina Faso. Designing a special shirt, Pathé’O crafted it from wax cloth and emblazoned it with Nelson Mandela’s face on the back. In an interview, he expressed his pride in being part of the collaboration: ‘The impact of this collection will echo across Africa, and the world.’79 Reaching into European haute couture, African printed fabrics also crop up on everyday items ranging from furniture covers and pillows to buttons, shoes, handbags, and more. In the international visual context, they have entered the art scene and dress the bodies of African American actors in blockbuster movies. With so many twists in the global circulation of African printed textiles, history turns on itself bringing us back to Indonesia. When Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first Black African president at the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, he wore a sombre-looking three-piece suit and tie, as did most of the men who were present on this much-anticipated occasion. The worldwide television transmission of the celebration following this special event showed invited guests in all manner of African-inspired dress and other types of festive wear. Comprising many ethnic and racial groups, South Africa has no single ‘traditional’ dress but several distinct dress styles, worn mostly at special events and for touristic purposes. The closest to what is considered local is the printed textile, isisheshwe, that until recently was produced in Europe. But already before taking office, Nelson Mandela invented a new tradition when on formal occasions he took up wearing loose, brightly coloured silk shirts with Indonesia-inspired prints in geometric or floral designs, thus prompting the development of 77

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www.standard.co.uk/fashion/dior-cruise-2020-show-african-artistsmarrakech-a4130181 (accessed 9 December 2020). Anne Grosfilley, African Print Textiles (Munich: Prestel, 2018). www.vogue.com.au/fashion/news/maria-grazia-chiuri-on-the-inspirationbehind-her-dior-resort-2020-collection/image-gallery/a34688f6e661ebaa d5ae4ff0b8bbf004 (accessed 9 December 2020).

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the Madiba shirt, named after his Xhosa clan name, that subsequently has become a popular men’s fashion garment across the region and beyond. Mandela first became fond of it when he was presented with batik print shirts by Indonesia’s President Suharto in 1990. The origin of the Madiba shirt is disputed. I like the account that attributes it to Pathé Ouédraogo. He explained: ‘It all started thanks to Myriam [sic] Makeba whom I knew well and who at the time lived in exile between Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire. Towards the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1993, she told me that President Mandela enjoyed wearing shirts and she took about four shirts to offer to him as gifts.80 Can you believe it? From my village to Abidjan, I could have never imagined designing the shirts Mandela would wear one day.’81 To be sure, the global flows of fashion influences are multidirectional. Today’s descendants of a textile born in Southeast Asia during the colonial period and industrialized in Europe have been fondly adopted by Africans on the continent and in the diaspora for everyday wear and festive occasions. Along the way, it picked up new imprints, as in the Indonesia-inspired Madiba shirt, men’s new African signature dress style in post-colonial South Africa.

conclusion Colonial fashion histories are encounters between a rich variety of local dress conventions and norms and dress practices introduced from the West. This chapter has showcased some of their deeply entangled interactions, the layering of styles and materials in overlapping fashion histories along with twists and turns of creative subversion and play, depending on time and place. The snapshots 80

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Renowned singer Miriam Makeba (1932–2008) was exiled from South Africa in 1959. When she married Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers in the United States, her growing civil rights activism became controversial and the couple moved to Guinea in West Africa. In 1990, near the end of apartheid, she returned to South Africa. See Tanisha C. Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 20–8. www.hamajimagazine.com/pathe-o-the-designer-who-dressed-royals/ (accessed 9 December 2020).

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from different colonies and time periods share a common thread, that the West is everywhere, dressed up, disguised, reappropriated as local, and above all, worn with pride. A few years ago following a popular lecture on changing dress practice in Africa, I was asked if the wearing of white bridal gowns was an example of cultural imperialism. A missionary society in East Africa had set up a project, renting used bridal gowns donated by parishioners in Denmark (Figure 34.4). The point of my lecture had been to demonstrate, as in this chapter, how local people long ago turned the West’s clothes into their own. To be sure, stereotypes about the West’s negative impact on other cultures persist in the Western popular imagination as well as in dress scholarship. Yet many anti-colonial activists wore suits and dresses, as do former colonial populations along with reinvented traditional or national dress on special occasions. What today is referred to as ‘traditional’ dress or increasingly as ‘heritage’ has thoroughly changed through interactions with Christianity, secular education, wage labour, consumption, and media exposure among many other active forces. And they keep changing. But the twenty-first-century globalization of

Figure 34.4

Wedding party on the road in Southern Province, Zambia, 2001. Photo by Karen Tranberg Hansen.

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fashion is not an exclusive product of the West.82 As this chapter has demonstrated, interconnections and links between countries and across continents are shuffling around a vast range of inspirations, prompting among others Viktor & Rolf’s twist with Vlisco fabrics in the Netherlands, Dior’s turn with Uniwax textiles in the Côte d’Ivoire, and Mandela’s Madiba shirts that reconnect the West’s textile pedigree between Indonesia and Africa. Meanwhile, Herero women proudly wear their visually striking long dresses, Pacific Island women their reimagined missionary robes, and women in Bahia their traje de baiana, while Argentinian tango dancing and its dress practice has been for decades one of the most popular national pastimes in Finland.83

select bibliography Eicher, Joanne B. and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins, ‘Definitions and Classifications of Dress: Implications for Analysis of Gender Roles’, in Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher (eds.), Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 8–28. Gott, Suzanne, Kristyne Loughran, Betsy D. Quick, and Leslie Rabine (eds.), African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum, UCLA, 2017). Hansen, Karen Tranberg, Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Hendrickson, Hildi, ‘Bodies and Flags: The Representation of Herero Identity in Colonial Namibia’, in Hildi Hendrickson (ed.), Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 217–23. Jolly, Margaret, ‘A Saturated History of Christianity and Cloth in Oceania’, in Hyaeweol Choi and Margaret Jolly (eds.), Divine Domesticities: Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2014), 429–54. Küchler, Susanne and Graeme Were (eds.), The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience (London: UCL Press, 2005).

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Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun, Fashion: 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); Ross, Clothing: A Global History. www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/world/europe/finnish-tango-the-passionand-the-melancholy.html (accessed 30 March 2020).

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colonial fashion histories Leeb-du Toit, Juliet, Isishweshwe: A History of the Indigenisation of Blueprint in Southern Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2017). Lemire, Beverly and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). Moorman, Marissa, ‘Putting on a Pano and Dancing Like Our Grandparents: Nation and Dress in Late Colonial Luanda’, in Jean Allman (ed.), Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 84–103. Philips, Ruth B., ‘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), 134–53. Picton, John, ‘Introduction. Technology, Tradition and Lurex: The Art of Textiles in Africa’, in John Picton (ed.), Technology, Tradition and Lurex: The Art of Textiles in Africa (Barbican Art Gallery; London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1995). Rabine, Leslie W., ‘Dressing up in Dakar’, L’Esprit Créateur, 37/1 (1997), 84–108. Ross, Robert, Clothing: A Global History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). Rovine, Victoria L., ‘Colonialism’s Clothing: Africa, France, and the Deployment of Fashion’, Design Issues, 25/3 (2009), 44–61. Sylvanus, Nina, Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

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MANUFACTURING FASHION IN THE POST-WAR PERIOD ve´ ronique pouillard

The fashion industry went through profound transformations during the post-war era. Fashion was from the onset a global industry, and yet with the last globalization post-1970, fashion increasingly catered for the masses and production transformed from local or semi-local clusters to global supply chains. The decoupling of two major operations of fashion firms, manufacturing and retail, is central to the economic and social geographies of post-war fashion. Manufacturing increasingly relocated overseas from Western nations. This had important consequences, as former manufacturing centres in the West aimed to rebrand themselves as creative and commercial centres, often with the help of government subventions. The West remained central in producing value in the design, branding, and retail of fashion. The Global South is offering ever new reservoirs of workforce to garment manufacturing, but it remains uncertain whether the manufacturing countries may gain leadership in other areas of value production, notably branding and design. Research for this chapter is based on primary sources, printed sources, and secondary literature from business and economic history, the cultural history of business, and fashion history. Reports by contemporary experts – Roy Helfgott, Helen Meiklejohn, and Bernard Roshco – have also been used as important sources to help understand the dynamics of manufacturing. The chapter is chronological, beginning with an examination of ready-to-wear, the cross-fertilization of

This research has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant CoG 818523, Project CREATIVE IPR.

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American and European techniques of production, and the advent of fashion for all. The post-war changes shed light on the survival of the haute couture industry in the West and how it evolved towards designer ready-to-wear and branded luxury. Then from the 1970s to the present, the emergence of fast fashion, a new form of production that integrated the just-in-time model to ready-to-wear manufacturing, opened a new phase for the industry. This was also the era of neoliberalism, of low-cost production, and of an overflowing of consumer goods. The COVID-19 health crisis has confirmed the need for a renewal in the fashion industries, and the great precarity of most of its manufacturing workers.1

the power of us garment manufacturing The most salient characteristic of the fashion industries during the second half of the twentieth century is the massification of production. Scholars trace this process through various types of production, in which the manufacturing of clothes followed fixed forms, and were not subjected to fashion changes; especially army uniforms and workwear.2 The need to dress all for service and for work created a push to standardize the sizes. Fittings and alterations were the most expensive part of the production of clothing.

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Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and in New York (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Regina L. Blaszczyk and Véronique Pouillard, ‘Fashion as Enterprise’, in Regina L. Blaszczyk and Véronique Pouillard (eds.), European Fashion: The Creation of a Global Industry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 1–30. Judith E. Coffin, The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Hasia Diner, ‘American Jewish Identity and the Garment Industry’, in Gabriel M. Goldstein and Elizabeth L. Greenberg (eds.), A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry, 1860–1960 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press and Yeshiva University Museum, 2012), 29–40; Pierre du Maroussem, La petite industrie: salaries et durée du travail. Vol. II. Le vêtement à Paris (Paris: Ministère du commerce, de l’industrie, des postes et des télégraphes, 1896); Camille Doublot, La protection légale des travailleurs de l’industrie du vêtement (Paris: L. Larose, 1899).

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They became even more expensive in the post-war era, when the costs of labour rose in Western countries. Limiting fittings and alterations by providing accurately sized clothes off the rack was a cost-efficient improvement.3 The United States was the biggest consumer market in the world during the post-war era and with centres in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, the US ready-to-wear industry was the largest producer of fashionable garments in the world.4 Paris and London remained important centres of fashion production and creative design. During the post-war era, couture shows attracted buyers from all over the world.5 Fashion industrialists, designers, and journalists flocked to the United States to observe how the ‘American fashion democracy’ functioned. This influence was reinforced by the European Recovery Plan, better known as the Marshall Plan. Groups of a dozen French industrialists funded by the Plan took several study trips to the United States, where they examined the organization of fashion production on-site. The French mission members aimed to examine the entire chain of production, from fibre-producing plants like DuPont in Delaware, to fashion forecasters and advertising agencies in New York.6 Today fashion is one of the most globalized industries and, yet, due to field configuring events such as the Fashion Weeks, the Big Four fashion cities, Paris, London, Milan, and New York, retain their aura of prestige in the geographies of fashion. During the 1950s, the industry to a large extent still revolved around prestigious haute couture firms and speciality shops 3

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Alexandra Palmer, Dior: A New Look, a New Enterprise (1947–1957) (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2009). Helen E. Meiklejohn, ‘Section VI, Dresses: The Impact of Fashion on a Business’, in Walton Hamilton (ed.), Price and Price Policies (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938). Jess Cartner-Morley, ‘The Fashion Show is Over: What I Have Learned from 20 Years of Catwalks’, The Guardian, 8 June 2020; Hannah Marriott, Morwenna Ferrier, Lauren Cochrane, Helen Seamons, Peter Bevan, and Priya Elan, ‘London Fashion Week Goes Digital: Seven Things We Learned’, The Guardian, 15 June 2020. Archives Nationales de France, Paris (hereafter ANF), AJ 81.71: ‘Notes de voyage de la mission aux U.S.A. de la délégation du vêtement féminin, Novembre–Décembre 1952 (Paris: Fédération de l’Industrie du Vêtement Féminin, 1954)’, 8–9.

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headquartered in the Big Four.7 Historians have rightly described the 1950s as the golden age of haute couture, yet this model did not adapt easily to a mass consumption society.8 In such a context, the French missions’ members aimed to understand why the US fashion industry was much more productive than the French. The mission members concluded that the US manufacturers were better organized. They also noted that the machines used in the US model workshops were neither brand new, nor much more sophisticated. Rather, it was the division of labour, the study of the floor plan, the tried and tested techniques of making some parts of the garments – reinforcing a shoulder or placing a belt, for example – that made a difference in US garment manufacturing.9

the difficult path to workers’ rights The production of ready-to-wear in the United States was considered to be an example to follow for its productivity, because it catered to the widest groups in society, and because during the interwar period workers enjoyed comparatively better labour conditions than in other countries. This had not always been the case. One of the most deadly labour accidents in the history of the garment industry is the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in downtown Manhattan in New York that caused the death of 146 workers, mostly women, some still teenagers. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire resulted in mass mourning, protests, public indignation, and political action. The legislature of the State of New York passed what became then the most protective law for garment workers in the world, and delegated police forces

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See Chapter 38 in this volume by Simona Segre Reinach for further discussion of these issues. Alexandra Palmer, ‘Inside Paris Haute Couture’, in Claire Wilcox (ed.), The Golden Age of Couture, Paris–London, 1947–1957 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007), 63–80. ANF, AJ 81.71: ‘Notes de voyage’; Roy B. Helfgott, ‘Women’s and Children’s Apparel’, in M. Hall (ed.), Made in New York: Case Studies in Metropolitan Manufacturing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 39, 77.

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and inspectors to verify its implementation on the factory floors.10 Women make up the majority of the workforce in the fashion industry. Recent research, however, has shown that to this day, the gender gap remains important in the industry. Women are numerous as operators, behind the sewing machines, and also in retail. But there are still fewer women Chief Executive Officers in the fashion business, especially in the largest firms.11 Earlier, women garment workers experienced a variety of challenges. As Judith Coffin has shown in her study on labour in late nineteenthcentury Paris workshops, the shift from cottage production to the factory was a difficult process. Most labourers had to care for dependants. Working at home allowed women to juggle these tasks, as paid-for child- or elderly care was an unaffordable luxury. This is a situation that the poorest workers also experience to this day. Even if the factories were originally presented as more salubrious, better lit and aired than the tenements or cottages where garment workers lived and worked, the shift to factory work made it impossible to care for others and to earn a living wage simultaneously (Figure 35.1). In the United States, women workers sometimes found challenges in getting represented by unions, even in cities where unionized workshops were numerous. This was the case in New York, where men and women competed for the best paid jobs in the industry, and where the earlier generations competed with the new waves of immigrants that were more flexible in accepting lower wages. These defining features in a competitive industry had the effect of pushing down the wage rate within the workforce. Cutters, who represented the aristocracy of the garment trades, were male workers. In this context, women labourers felt that 10

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Hasia R. Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Grove Press, 2003); https://digitalcommons .ilr.cornell.edu/kheel/ (accessed 25 April 2023). This subject is discussed further in Chapter 33 by Kaiser and Cole in this volume. ‘Fashion’s Woman Problem’, The New York Times, 20 May 2018; Pamela N. Danziger, ‘Would More Women in Fashion Power Positions Mean More Female Customers?’, Forbes, 3 February 2019.

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Figure 35.1 Garment tenement building at Elizabeth Street, Lower East Side, New York, 1912. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine / Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images.

their voices were not always heard, and that unions did not always provide adequate representation for their own needs (Figure 35.2).12

a specialized and fragmented industry In his book The Shock of the Old (2007), historian David Edgerton noted that the sewing machine, invented in the mid-nineteenth century, remains to this day the main tool for the garment industry. The sewing machine’s technology was upgraded several times over a century and a half, yet these changes remained limited. The main development was the shift from the hand- or foot-powered treadle to electric power. Thanks to electrification, sewing machines went from 800 stitches per minute in the midnineteenth century, to 5,000 in the 1950s. The use of electric cutting knives to cut through the lay (the layers of fabric placed 12

Coffin, The Politics of Women’s Work; Nancy L. Green, ‘Fashion, Flexible Specialization, and the Sweatshop’, in Daniel E. Bender and Richard A. Greenwald (eds.), Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2003), 44–8.

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Figure 35.2 An Italian woman sewing in an unidentified factory, possibly New York City, c. 1930. The sewing machine is a stable technology in the garment industry. Photo by Lewis W. Hine / George Eastman Museum / Getty Images.

on a table forming the parts to be assembled into a garment) allowed faster work. In the 1950s, electric knives could cut the pieces necessary for assembling 100 or 200 garments at once. The profession of cutter demanded a great capacity to focus, as one small deviation of the blade could result in the loss of a hundred pieces of fabric at once. From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, machines developed in a way that considerably accelerated production, but the technology itself remained unchanged, resting upon the sewing machines and the human hand moving the fabric through the machines (Figure 35.3).13 A high division of operations resulting in a fragmentation of the sector between various types of entrepreneurs and firms, 13

David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2007); Ryan Lampe and Petra Moser, ‘Do Patent Pools Encourage Innovation? Evidence from the 19th-Century Sewing Machine Industry’, NBER Working Paper 15061 (June 2009); A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry. Exhibition catalogue (New York: Yeshiva University Museum, 2005), 92; Helfgott, ‘Women’s and Children’s Apparel’, 38, 44.

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Figure 35.3 A cutter in the Cooperative Garment Factory at Jersey Homesteads preparing the pattern of a woman’s coat to be made in Hightstown, New Jersey, United States Resettlement Administration in 1936. Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

characterized the garment industry. In the early 1960s fashion expert Bernard Roshco provided a clear outline of the structure of the industry, in which he showed that the manufacturer owned what the industry called an ‘inside shop’, which means that he owned his own production plant. The manufacturer organized an important part of the supply chain, from the purchase of the fabric, to the selling of the finished garments to the retailers. Another distinct type of entrepreneur in the US garment industry was the jobber. Jobbers bought the fabric, and usually managed a cutting room where their employees cut the fabric. Once the fabric was cut, the jobbers sent the pieces in bundles to be sewn by another manufacturing operation. Jobbers then took back the finished clothes and sold them to retailers who had their own showrooms. Showrooms, often housed within garment district high-rises, were the place where the manufacturers and the retailers met. Roshco observes the difference in décor in the showroom, where

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mirrors, wall-to-wall carpeting, and, for the higher-end shops, expensive furniture and art were on display. In the back, or in other buildings, the workshops were functional and without frills.14 Working in a complementary manner to the jobber, the contractor was the person running the outside shop, where he hired operators to sew the garments together, and was not involved in marketing the clothes. The workers operating the sewing machines, called in the industry jargon the ‘operators’, could work faster by releasing the tension of the thread on their machines, which made it possible to sew up to three times faster, but the seams were also made of larger stitches, and were therefore less strong. Faster work done in wider stitches was a direction taken in the manufacturing industry that strongly contrasted with the methods and know-how that remain to this day central to the production of high-quality manufacturers and haute couture firms.15 The organization of New York fashion production was to some extent different from the industry in Paris. The firms of the Sentier, the name given to the central ready-to-wear manufacturing district in Paris, share some characteristics with the New York Garment District firms, as studied by historian Nancy Green in her important comparative work, yet they were often more artisanal than the workshops in the United States.16 The haute couture firms, that still gave direction to the industry, were more integrated organizations than the firms in the United States. Couturiers chose the fabric, and from that point they ran all the operations under the roof of the haute couture house, and under their own brand name. Only perfumes, packaging, and part of the manufacturing of couture branded accessories were made elsewhere. In the holiday season, retail branches sold part of the merchandise in resorts. Haute couture firms hosted operations ranging from creation to branding 14

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Bernard Roshco, The Rag Race: How New York and Paris Run the Breakneck Business of Dressing American Women (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, Inc., 1963), 75. Ibid., 60–2, 244; Thérèse de Dillmont, Encyclopédie des ouvrages de dames (Mulhouse: Th. de Dillmont Editeur, n.d.), 26; Helfgott, ‘Women’s and Children’s Apparel’, 26. Green, Ready-to-Wear; Solange Montagné-Villette, Le Sentier. Un espace ambigu (Paris: Masson, 1990).

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under one roof, while garment production in the United States was segmented and often produced in anonymous workshops.17 A small group of Paris couturiers settling in New York during the post-war years contributed to changes in the structure of the industry by commissioning their lines to higher-end garment district manufacturers. Before the war, Paris couturiers who had wanted to open a branch in the United States imported designs made in France, which aligned with the policies of the employers’ syndicate Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, but created trouble with the US custom authorities. In the post-war era, the Paris couture industry opened its doors to manufacturers from the French provinces for authorized reproductions, and in a similar movement, couturiers agreed to design branded ready-to-wear lines made outside their walls. Couturiers commissioned the manufacturing of their American lines to skilled New York manufacturers: Jacques Fath contracted the orders for his American line to Joseph Halpert, Pierre Balmain to Maria Krum, and Christian Dior to Vincent J. Coppola.18 This was a game changer for haute couture, which started to make revenue from branded lines of licensed products.19 In the United States, the relation between the jobber and the contractor allowed for more flexibility and specialization, as underlined by Roy B. Helfgott in his study of the garment industry published in 1959. But the relation between jobber and contractor also created further challenges. As mentioned earlier, the sector 17

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Alexandra Palmer, Couture and Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2001), 75–8. ‘Balmain Plans American Line’, The New York Times, 6 December 1951, 55; Valérie Guillaume, Jacques Fath (Paris: Adam Biro, 1993); Joanne Olian, ‘From Division Street to Seventh Avenue’, in Goldstein and Greenberg (eds.), A Perfect Fit, 123–7; Didier Grumbach, Histoires de la mode (Paris: Editions du Regard, 2008 [1993]), 135–6; Véronique Pouillard, ‘Managing Fashion Creativity: The History of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne during the Interwar Period’, Investigaciónes de Historia Economica/Economic History Research, 12/2 (2016), 76–89. Geoffrey G. Jones and Véronique Pouillard, Christian Dior: A New Look for Haute Couture, Harvard Business School Case no. 809-159 (2009, revised 2017); Tomoko Okawa, ‘Licensing Practices at Maison Dior’, in Regina L. Blaszczyk (ed.), Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 82–107.

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was characterized by important competition, and in such conditions, jobbers were pushed to bid for the cheapest work that any contractor could do in the shortest amount of time. Such dynamics of competition in a risk-prone environment resulted in making the garment industry one of the purest examples of capitalism, reflected the experts of the time. It resulted in pressure on the workers to work for less, to use weaker stitches, to finish orders on or before time, and to compete for jobs.20 In 1954, the United States federal government organized a census of manufactures that included information on garment production. At that point, the New York metropolitan area sold 66 per cent of women’s and children’s garments in the United States; it accounted for 43 per cent of the employees in that sector and produced 51 per cent of its manufacturing added value.21 New York remained important to the trade throughout the twentieth century, as it provided the largest reservoir of workforce to an industry that used more hands during the high seasons. To this day New York is also the most important market in the world for the retail of personal luxury goods. Counties around New York created a hinterland of firms that produced haberdashery, accessories, and machines. For example, novelist Philip Roth describes in The Plot against America (2004) how the Singer sewing machine plant in his hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, attracted a low-skilled workforce that had little hope of other sources of revenue.22 Manufacturing clothes was among the activities that needed the least capital to start a firm, and garment firms were often small units. In the mid-1950s, most firms started with around $25,000 and a maximum of $100,000.23 There were some exceptions. In the 1950s the largest company was Jonathan Logan Inc., that ran over forty workshops and made an annual return of $36,000,000. But Logan did not amount to more than 3 per cent of the total sales of the industry, which shows that the trade was then still highly fragmented.24 Most of these firms were not public, meaning that their managers owned the capital and risks, yet they did not have to 20 22

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Helfgott, ‘Women’s and Children’s Apparel’, 27. 21 Ibid., 25. Ibid., 41, 65; Philip Roth, The Plot against America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004). Helfgott, ‘Women’s and Children’s Apparel’, 30. 24 Ibid., 34.

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address the demands of a board. To sum up, the US garment manufacturing industry was composed of small firms, mostly selfcapitalized with modest start-up funds, and with a short lifespan due to high risk. Often, bankrupted industrialists soon reopened a new company, switching industrial partners within the trade, as in the words of expert Max Hall, ‘although firms come and go, the individuals stay much longer’.25

design and the market There was considerable difference in the quality, design content, and price range among New York garment district manufacturers. Norman Norell, Pauline Trigère (French-born and immigrated to the United States in the 1940s), James Galanos, and Ben Zuckerman were top-quality manufacturers who had their showrooms at prestigious addresses for the trade, such as 550 Seventh Avenue. These manufacturers sold the clothes they designed at prices that were close to those of Paris haute couture: $350 for dresses, $700 for suits, and evening gowns going up to a thousand dollars. They sold innovative garments made with skill and catered to an elite of consumers.26 The US garment industry also offered dresses at every price point. Discussions on the regulation of the industry in the United States Congress during the interwar period resulted in a consensus that America was a fashion democracy where citizens of moderate income should be able to afford fashionable dress.27 But the demand was hard to predict for industrialists who often struggled to keep afloat and needed to ‘come up with the right styles at the right time at the right price’.28 Workers suffered from the irregularity of demand and the pressure of the contractors, and many were subjected to the sweating system. Business owners were endangered by several stress factors listed by the trade experts as the pressure of competition, reorders, and contracting.29 A side effect was practices that the industrialists themselves described as 25 27

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Ibid., 30–1. 26 Roshco, The Rag Race, 41. Jessica Daves, Ready-Made Miracle: The American Story of Fashion for the Millions (New York: Putnam, 1967), 10. Roshco, The Rag Race, 43. 29 Ibid., 74; Meiklejohn, ‘Section VI, Dresses’.

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copying and piracy. The higher-end firms earned enough revenue to pay in-house skilled designers and to send buyers to Paris to purchase original couture designs with a right to manufacture authorized reproductions. In addition, advertising a design as Parisian, whether or not it actually originated in Paris, was still an effective promotional tool in the 1960s.30 Bernard Roshco explains how the process was organized for prosperous New York manufacturers, for whom it was common to prepare 120 samples of dresses, then receive orders for half of them, and to sell six of these dresses in mass quantities. The dresses that failed to be purchased were called in professional jargon ‘dogs’, the reordered dresses were called ‘runners’, and the much-loved designs that became copies at all price points were called the ‘Fords’ – in other words, ‘a fashion must prove itself by selling’.31 The main challenge for the fashion industry was to reorder stocks of the right dress at the right time, a problem that has tormented fashion workers until the late twentieth century, when fast fashion firms started using information technology methods to get ahead, and the relocation of the manufacturing went to ever lower cost countries. Before fast fashion firms adopted the tools of IT, success was partly due to luck, but also to taste and the ability to understand the consumers’ whims.32 Copying was an integral part of the fashion industry. Fashions were from the onset based on imitation, as noted by sociologist Gabriel Tarde.33 Copying was not just considered to be a transatlantic trade; US garment industrialists also copied each other, joked about it, and sometimes sued each other. Generally, the culture of Seventh Avenue was more tolerant of copying than the French haute couture industry, and French law was more repressive against fashion copying.34 The US industry was a mix of industrialists who thought that being copied, or having their designs ‘knocked off’, was a sign of success and others who thought 30 31 33

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Palmer, Couture and Commerce; Roshco, The Rag Race, 153. Roshco, The Rag Race, 46. 32 Ibid., 45. Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation (Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2001 [1890]). Véronique Pouillard, ‘Design Piracy on the Fashion Industries of Paris and New York in the Interwar Years’, Business History Review, 85/2 (2011), 319–44.

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that copying colleagues working in the same price category showed a lack of morality in business.35 The social habits of the profession reveal fine lines about its norms. A keen observer of the New York manufacturing district, Bernard Roshco noted that manufacturers in the affordable lines tended to feel comfortable copying designs unauthorized from the higher-end firms, but avoided copying from firms that produced lines at the same prices and therefore were direct competitors.36 Such practices show complex interpretations of norms in business.37

changes in the geography of production New York was still the world’s first centre of fashion production in the 1950s, but relocation of the production had already started. Several factors were responsible for the relative decline of New York production. One reason was the casualization of clothing.38 New York had traditionally been a centre of production for luxurious, premium, and better apparel. The growing demand for sportswear and for clothes made in the new synthetic fabrics rose at the expense of the New York production.39 American and French experts evaluated that what made the difference in the efficiency of the US garment industry overall was not the machines or techniques used, but rather the simplification of the garment itself. Simpler cuts, less ornamented, easier 35

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Sara B. Marcketti and Jean L. Parsons, Knock It Off! A History of Design Piracy in the US Women’s Ready-to-Wear Apparel Industry (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2016). Roshco, The Rag Race, 51. Emmanuelle Fauchart and Eric von Hippel, ‘Norms-Based Intellectual Property Systems: The Case of French Chefs’, Organization Science, 19/2 (2007), 187–201; Kai Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman, ‘The Piracy and Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design’, Virginia Law Review, 92 (2006), 1687–777; Susan Scafidi, Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Marcketti and Parsons, Knock It Off!; Rosemary Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Regina L. Blaszczyk, ‘The Rise and Fall of European Fashion at Filene’s in Boston’, in Blaszczyk and Pouillard (eds.), European Fashion, 170–200. Helfgott, ‘Women’s and Children’s Apparel’, 79; Roshco, The Rag Race, 39.

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to fit on a more diverse range of bodies, were the source of its efficiency. This shift was supported by a rising demand for informal clothes, especially separates and sports garments.40 Simplifying the cuts, for example with the chemise dress, a loose style that could be belted to adjust to the body, was also a response to the question of sizing, the major challenge that the ready-to-wear industry had to address when catering for its customers.41 Manufacturers of American adaptations of Paris designers usually replaced the hooks and eyes of the Paris dresses with zippers in the American copies.42 In the United States despite efforts at the national level to measure the population, update those measurements, and standardize clothing sizes, sizes still differed between manufacturers, as some of them changed the standard measurements, aiming to better address their clients’ demands.43 Sizing was complicated by the fact that not all cuts fit all bodies comfortably. In the 1950s various silhouettes could already be found on the market, following for example in the footsteps of couturiers like Dior, who offered corolla-type and straight H-line dresses over a short timespan. Increasingly, different silhouettes and cuts catered to various consumers and lifestyles, which slowed down the standardization of ready-to-wear.44 In similar categories of apparel, the cost of fabric could hardly be reduced. Manufacturers aiming to lower their costs of production, therefore, went for the cost of labour. One way to do this was to increase the division of labour, using a low-skilled workforce for the simplest operations, and a skilled workforce for the most 40

41

42 43 44

ANF, AJ 81.71: ‘Notes de voyage’; Helfgott, ‘Women’s and Children’s Apparel’, 39, 77; Andrew Godley, ‘The Development of the Clothing Industry: Technology and Fashion’, Textile History, 28/1 (1997), 3–10; W. Aldritch, ‘History of Sizing Systems and Ready-to-Wear Garments’, in S. P. Ashdown (ed.), Sizing in Clothing: Developing Effective Sizing Systems for Ready-to-Wear Clothing (Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing, 2007), 1–56. Bernardine Taub, ‘Designer Builds a Junior Business Success on the Chemise Dress’, Women’s Wear Daily, 22 August 1957, 2; Patricia A. Cunningham, ‘Dressing for Success: The Re-suiting of Corporate America in the 1970s’, in Patricia A. Cunningham and Linda Welters (eds.), Twentieth-Century American Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 201–7. Roshco, The Rag Race, 167. J. C. Furnas, How America Lives (London: John Lane, 1943), 241–9. Roshco, The Rag Race, 59; Caroline Rennolds Milbank, New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 175.

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delicate operations.45 Labour regulations were for a large part left to the legislature of each state in the United States. The New York metropolitan area was a high-skill and high-wage region and was the most unionized in the United States. In order to escape the more restrictive states, manufacturers gradually moved all or part of their production to the less unionized and less regulated states, many of them in the South. Regions that suffered from a loss of jobs in other sectors also provided a cheaper workforce. In the 1950s, this was the case, for example, of former textile workers in Massachusetts, now ready to shift to garment manufacturing jobs, and in the coal mining regions of Pennsylvania, where the families of former miners, now unemployed, took over manufacturing jobs and, noted manufacturing expert Max Hall, were ‘willing to take work at just about any wages they could get’.46 New York remained the place where manufacturers had their showrooms. So even while production started relocating, New York remained the marketing hub of the industry.47 However, New York was losing production to close states where unions were less present, especially New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the 1950s, and to emerging manufacturing centres such as Los Angeles, St. Louis, Dallas, and Miami.48 This caused a relative erosion of the bargaining power of the unions, including the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), that remained powerful in New York, but during those years did not succeed in unionizing garment manufactures in the Southern states.49 The difficulties met by the union when confronting regions of lower salaries can be considered against the backdrop of the challenges of globalization to come for the industry, this time between the West and the Global South. Going back to the 1950s, most New York garment manufacturers, facing the growing competition of new productive regions, sought to employ a workforce that would accept the lowest salaries and the seasonal variations of production in the industry, which resulted in stretches of unemployment during the slack season. In such conditions, the industry recruited the cheapest and most 45 47 48

Helfgott, ‘Women’s and Children’s Apparel’, 83. 46 Ibid., 86. Roshco, The Rag Race, 21. Helfgott, ‘Women’s and Children’s Apparel’, 21, 29. 49 Ibid., 89, 90.

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flexible labour to be found, first among immigrant women from Italy, then from Puerto Rican and African American women.50 A group of islands in the Caribbean with a status of commonwealth to the United States, Puerto Rico, also became a place of garment production in itself. From 1917, people from Puerto Rico were American citizens but with partial access to the franchise. The minimum wage was lower in Puerto Rico than in the United States, and the islands also benefited from a favourable tax regime, according to which firms did not pay taxes during a renewable term of ten years, which attracted some manufacturers. This is one among many examples of the gradual relocation of fashion manufacturing production to overseas sites where the price of labour was cheaper, a movement that over the twentieth century redrew the map of the fashion manufacturing industry.51

the big four In Europe, France managed a remarkable return to the world fashion stage in the post-war years. It remained a show window for the productions of the country, but the top Paris haute couture houses, which used to set the tone for higher-end and aspirational female fashion design at the international level, had to adapt to the rules of the welfare state, and to a shrinking clientele. During the interwar period, entering a Paris haute couture firm was a privilege reserved for private clients from France and from everywhere else, and for the foreign corporate buyers. Keeping haute couture in Paris and out of the hands of the local ready-to-wear manufacturing represented an aspirational view of consumption that was no longer suited to the realities of the post-war markets.52 For all these 50 51

52

Ibid., 96, 97. Ibid., 109; Eric Bond, ‘Tax Holidays and Industry Behavior’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 63/1 (1981), 88–95; Carmen T. Whalen, ‘Sweatshops Here and There: The Garment Industry, Latinas, and Labor Migrations’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 61 (2002), 45–68; Ramona Hernandez, ‘On Dominicans in New York City’s Garment Industry’, in Daniel Soyer (ed.), A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization, and Reform in New York City’s Garment Industry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 168–91. Roshco, The Rag Race, 157.

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reasons, the Paris haute couture firms opened their doors to the French provincial manufacturers from 1947, asking their new clients to pay a deposit fee that was around $2,000 per season including reproduction rights. This new strategy resulted in millions in additional revenue from Paris couture, simply in its domestic market. Paris had never been the sole place for higher-end, creative fashions. London was the home of thriving couture, tailoring, and young stylists. The Italian cities of Florence, Milan, Rome, and Turin (among others) were all fashion centres in their own right, each featuring a crop of talented couturiers, hinterlands composed of skilled manufacturers, and history that industrialists were keen to turn into sales promotion.53 Italian couturiers offered elegant designs served by high-quality materials at a lower price than Paris couture, which made Italian fashion competitive during the 1950s. Milan eventually detached itself from the cohort of Italian fashion cities and is to this day one of the Big Four fashion cities in the West along with Paris, New York, and London.54

from the 1970s: the impact of the last globalization The history of the fashion industry in the United States shows how manufacturers have relocated all parts of production that could be done in places with cheaper labour. The cost of materials and especially of fabric could be reduced to some extent by a greater

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Elisabetta Merlo and Marco Perugini, ‘Making Italian Fashion Global: Brand Building and Management at Gruppo Finanziaro Tessile (1950s–1990s)’, Business History, 60/1 (2020), 42–69. This point is discussed in more detail in Chapter 38 by Simona Segre Reinach in this volume. Roshco, The Rag Race, 158–9; Elisabetta Merlo and Francesca Polese, ‘Turning Fashion into Business: The Emergence of Milan as an International Fashion Hub’, Business History Review, 80/3 (2006), 415–47; Carlo Marco Belfanti, ‘Renaissance and Made in Italy: Marketing Italian Fashion through History (1949–1952)’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 20/1 (2014), 53–66; Sonnet Stanfill, ‘Anonymous Tastemakers: The Role of American Buyers in Establishing an Italian Fashion Industry, 1950–55’, in Blaszczyk and Pouillard (eds.), European Fashion, 146–69; Chiara Fagella, ‘Not So Simple: Reassessing 1951, G. B. Giorgini and the Launch of Italian Fashion’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Stockholm, 2019).

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use of artificial fibres, but manufacturers who wanted to reduce their costs and offer cheaper products believed they had to reduce wages. The taxes to pay and regulations to follow in welfare states limited such options. Reductions could be achieved by either employing people outside of the legal labour conditions, or by outsourcing the production to lower cost countries. In practice, some manufacturers did both. Despite the relentless work of unions, activists, and labour organizations, breaches of human rights and ruthless exploitation of the workforce remain common in the manufacturing industries.55 The period that stretches from the 1970s to the COVID-19 health crisis can be characterized as the most recent wave of globalization. The fast globalization of the fashion trades, linked to a dramatic rise in the demand for cheaper, throw-away mass-manufactured fashionable garments and accessories, had important consequences for employment in states with established welfare systems. Jobs and firms left many old textile and garment industrial clusters, including northern Italy, northern Britain, the region of Flanders across Belgium and the north of France, the region of Lodz in Poland, Greece, numerous sates in the United States including New York and Massachusetts, and in Australia and New Zealand. States that supported an extensive welfare system could not compete with the price of labour of emerging countries. The production of the cheapest garments follows the cheapest, most fragile, and exploitable workforce. Fashion retailers favoured outsourcing manufacturing of clothes to China from the 1980s, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and today Ethiopia, which is deemed ‘the new frontier’ of the garment industry. The garment industry is a major component of the transition of Ethiopia from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy, and is now threatened by war and the COVID-19 pandemic.56

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A recent case is discussed by Annie Kelly, ‘Fashion’s Dirty Secret: How Sexual Assault Took Hold in Jeans Factories’, The Guardian, 20 August 2020. Leslie W. Rabine, The Global Circulation of African Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 14–15; Paul M. Barrett and Dorothée Baumann-Pauly, Report: Made in Ethiopia: Challenges in the Garment Industry’s New Frontier (New York: New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, 2019).

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For the former centres of garment production, the results were job losses, social instability, and a need for reconversion. Governments set up strategies at local and global levels to try to alleviate the consequences of the fast changes in the industry. One type of strategy of countries that had lost production to overseas manufactures, was to reconvert as a port of entry for mass production, which was the case to some extent for Great Britain, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, and especially the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the firm C&A developed as a retail chain that outsourced the production of manufactured clothing to overseas, low-cost countries. Retailers such as the Irish firm Primark have pushed down the pricing of clothing articles to its lowest levels.57 A second type of strategy was to support the reconversion of old production centres with public and private funding, a strategy that is visible for example in Belgium, the north of Britain, the north of Italy, and in Poland, among other cases. Belgium seems to be a success story among such cases. The country had a long history of fibre, textile, garment, and handcraft production. The lion’s share of these manufacturers could not resist the globalization of the production. Some fibre and textile producers reconverted, for example, producing textiles for industrial usage. A small number of medium- to high-quality manufacturers also remained. In addition, Belgium found a fashion renewal in a group of firms that started small in Antwerp, in the wake of the deconstructionist fashions that emerged in the 1980s and became, along with Japanese production, the spearhead of minimalist higher-end ready-to-wear that is avidly followed by dedicated customers. They found local investors in businesspeople who had robust assets in other sectors, and benefited from government support to creativity, in the form of direct subventions, grants, and prizes aiming to buttress the prestige of fashion as a creative industry. While the case of the Antwerp designers, and especially the group of the Antwerp Six, with the 57

Thierry Charlier, ‘Un exemple de coopération entre les pouvoirs publics et le secteur privé. Le programme quinquennal de restructuration de l’industrie belge du textile et de la confection en août 1980’ (Unpublished MA Thesis in Economics, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, 1985), 6–12; Howard Mustoe, ‘Coronavirus: Primark Sells Nothing as Retailers Struggle’, BBC News Online, 21 April 2020, www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi ness-52365191 (accessed 25 April 2023).

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addition of Martin Margiela, seems to be a success story in creativity, the outcome of strategies of subvention remains difficult to measure in the long term.58 A third strategy, developed at the global level and not exclusive of the strategies discussed above, was to set up quotas of entry for textile and garment products, in order to limit the orders placed by the large fashion multinationals to the units of production in lowcost countries. Garments produced in Asia, in the Caribbean region, in former Eastern bloc countries, and in North African countries fast outpaced the production of the Northern European states, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) system provided a framework to draw up agreements on imported quotas of textiles and garments in the form, first of the Multifiber Agreement (MFA) from 1974 until 1995, then the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) from 1995 to 2005. In 2005 the quota system ended. The industry follows the GATT rules. Agreements aimed to limit the overflow of low-cost goods on the markets, but experts observed that frauds happened under the regime of quotas. One enduring question is the consequences of trade quotas, under which some countries found that their production was unduly penalized, as was the case of Greece, for example. It is certain that the end of the MFA in 2005 has resulted in a new boom for the deregulated garment industry, an overflow of cheaper garments retailed with little oversight over the chains of production within a context of neoliberal politics.59 An important consequence of the global reorganization of the fashion industry over the last half century is a relocation of part of the manufacturing in the Global South. And yet, to this day, the countries of the European Union are together the second highest exporter of garments after China. European countries have retained 58

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An Moons, ‘To Be (in) or Not to Be (in): The Constituting Processes and Impact Indicators of the Flemish Designer Fashion Industry Undressed’, in Nele Bernheim (ed.), Modus Operandi: State of Affairs in Current Research on Belgian Fashion (Antwerp: Mode Museum, 2008), 69–81. Charlier, ‘Un exemple de coopération’, 16; Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Knopf, 1999); Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2009), 171–205; also see Chapter 42 by Lucy Norris in this volume.

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numerous jobs not only in value creation, branding, marketing, and retail, but also to some extent in manufacturing. The so-called fast fashion system itself is based on complex geographies of fashion production. In his 1963 book on the garment industry, Bernard Roshco exposed the importance of speedy copying to the prosperity of the fashion trade: ‘The American garment industry’s ultraJapanese ability to copy and mass-produce new designs almost as soon as the originals are shown enables it to utilize the inspirations of designers in every fashion center of the world.’60 In earlier decades, the garment industries experienced risk caused by the inability to foresee exactly which designs would succeed with consumers. Since the late 1920s, the expertise of trend forecasting aimed to ease such risks, as described by Regina L. Blaszczyk in Chapter 36 in this volume.61 But forecasting was no exact science, and skilled entrepreneurs could experience losses if they had placed orders that failed to meet the demand, even in times of prosperity. The next innovation came during the mid1970s from A Coruña, a medium-sized town in Spain, on the Atlantic coast. Zara, the best-known retailer brand of Inditex Group, based in that Spanish town, developed systems of quick response based on data on consumer purchases. Zara can make a copy of a fashionable item seen on the catwalk in less than two weeks. It still produces in batches, but quasi-immediate and automated information on consumers’ purchases allows for reorder on time and avoids reorders of unsuccessful styles. In addition, fast fashion firms have adapted orders to the place of production. Basic, staple clothing is made in distant, lower cost workshops, while the most fashionable garments are made closer to the headquarters, in Mediterranean and Eastern European countries. That way, the

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Roshco, The Rag Race, 126. William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1994), 311–13; Véronique Pouillard, ‘The Rise of Fashion Forecasting and Fashion PR, 1920–1940: The History of Tobé and Bernays’, in Hartmut Berghoff and Thomas Kühne (eds.), Globalizing Beauty: Consumerism and Body Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 151–69; Regina L. Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs, The Fashion Forecasters: A Hidden History of Color and Trend Prediction (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

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retailer can source articles in the most efficient way and pursue nuanced pricing strategies.62 China is a notable example of a country that has transformed from producing in the lower grades, to diversifying production to include high-quality products and creative designs.63 Economists have argued that countries that engage in low-cost fashion production go through a ‘t-shirt phase’ as a necessary step of low-skilled jobs, expected to be followed by an increase in higher-skilled jobs, which should eventually result in prosperity. But the case of China, among other examples, shows that while some regions have surmounted the so-called t-shirt phase, ongoing breaches of the human rights of workers remain, notably in the case of minorities.64 In some countries the ‘t-shirt phase’ seems to last, as in the case of Bangladesh, where the garment industry has gone through repeated labour disasters among which the 1991 Saraca fire that killed 25, and the Rana Plaza collapse in Dhaka in 2013 that killed 1,134, the most deadly in the history of the industry. NGOs and tripartite organizations advocate that firms, in case of accidents or other instability, avoid doing a cut and run on their orders, and that all actors can work together for developing better labour conditions. The current COVID-19 crisis has created unexpected disasters as demand plummeted and intermediaries in the supply chain could no longer pay for their orders. This crisis has pushed thousands of workers of the

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Xabier R. Blanco and Jesús Salgado, Armancio Ortega. De Cero a Zara (Madrid: La Esfero de los Libros, 2011), 76; Enrique Badia, Zara and Her Sisters: The Story of the World’s Largest Clothing Retailer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 22–3; Andrew McAfee, Vincent Dessain, and Anders Sjöman, ‘Zara: IT for Fast Fashion’, case study no. 9-604-081, Harvard Business School, 6 September 2007; Sabine Chrétien-Ichikawa, ‘La réémergence de la mode en Chine et le rôle du Japon’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., EHESS, Paris, 2012); Kazunori Takada and Grace Huang, ‘Uniqlo Thinks Faster Fashion Can Help It Beat Zara’, Bloomberg, 16 March 2017. Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Yanagisako, Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Chinese-Italian Fashion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Juanjuan Wu, Yue Hu, Lei Xu, and Marylin R. DeLong, ‘Designed in China: Multiple Approaches to Fashion and Retail’, in Wessie Ling and Simona Segre Reinach (eds.), Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 69–93. Annie Kelly, ‘Virtually Entire Fashion Industry Complicit in Uighur Forced Labour, Say Rights Groups’, The Guardian, 23 July 2020.

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Figure 35.4 A workshop in the Sepal Group large-scale factory producing clothing for American clothing companies, November 2018. Photo by Andrew Holbrooke / Corbis via Getty Images.

lower cost economies, including in Bangladesh, onto the streets to ask for their jobs to be maintained (Figure 35.4).65

crisis, failures, and flexibility The impact of the COVID crisis has disrupted the fashion industry, with growth figures going negative in double digits for both small and large firms. A major risk for the industry, beyond the question of forecasting discussed earlier in this chapter, is the problem of stocks. As mentioned by Alfred Chandler about US department stores, remaining stocks of fashion merchandise cost storage space, and because of the transient nature of fashion, they also depreciate in an exponential manner.66 In the years before the COVID-19

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Noemi Sinkovics, Samia Ferdous Hoque, and Rudolf R. Sinkovics, ‘Rana Plaza Collapse Aftermath: Are CSR Compliance and Auditing Pressures Effective?’, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 29/4 (2016), 624–5. Alfred D. Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 59–61.

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crisis hit, important fashion brands, both luxury and high street, were already experiencing overproduction resulting in large stocks of unsold inventory.67 The crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic has had a quasiimmediate and profound effect on the industry. Consumer-led movements had, over the past century, insisted on a chastised consumption of fashion that could result in buying from selected, traceable sources, and in buying fewer clothes. Reasons evoked were the conditions of labour and, increasingly when approaching the millennium, the environmental footprint of the fashion industries that are generally considered the second most polluting after fossil fuels. The calls for a reform of fashion were therefore not new. Before the crisis, some mid-tier to higher-end brands struggled to survive. During the first half of 2020, however, numerous important fashion retailers and manufacturers, some of them already struggling before the crisis, filed for bankruptcy. The pandemic crisis has resulted in a shift for numerous workers to weeks and months of working from home or job losses, and greater casualization of dress that impacts on demand. One of the most prominent firms for conservative career wear, Brooks Brothers, in business for 200 years and producing all its garments in the United States, filed for bankruptcy in July 2020.68 This is also the case for J.Crew, while The Gap Inc. was unable to pay the rent of its retail shops in the United States during the crisis. Smaller, high-end firms including Beckham and von Furstenberg are laying off 20 or 30 per cent of their employees. The shock of the COVID19 crisis goes beyond the changes in the fashion system initiated by consumer movements. Considering the number of bankruptcies, the importance of some of the bankrupt firms, and the drop in purchases, this crisis marks a break in the growth of the fashion industries. Rebounds in purchases observed at the end of confinement periods are not sufficient to maintain all firms.69 67

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Julia Kollewe, ‘Burberry to Stop Burning Unsold Items after Green Criticism’, The Guardian, 6 September 2018. Jordan Valinsky, ‘Brooks Brothers Files for Bankruptcy’, CNN Business, 8 July 2020. ‘UK Retail Spending Rebounds to Near Pre-Lockdown Levels’, Business of Fashion, 24 July 2020.

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During the COVID-19 crisis, fashion firms have also been able to use their sewing machines to shift extremely swiftly from producing fashionable garments to necessary equipment such as scrubs, gloves, and masks. Fashion still largely uses sewing machines and proceeds in batch production. This flexibility enables it to shift the production from fashionable items, into necessary objects.70 These products are defined by their utility, and not by the fact that they are made to address the consumers’ demand for fashion.71

conclusion Garment industries have rested since the mid-nineteenth century on the very stable technology of the sewing machine. Over the course of the twentieth century, the evolution of sewing machines and cutting blades, especially through the power of electricity, allowed for an acceleration of garment manufacturing work. Innovations such as the zipper and lycra have a durable impact on the clothes we wear. Furthermore, part automation has occurred through knitting machines, but sewing robots remain so far uncompetitive in comparison to the cost of human labour. As a contrast, the know-how and techniques of the designer manufactured lines and haute couture industry have remained, but only catering to a rarefied clientele and thanks to the funding of large, international luxury groups. Over the course of the twentieth century, the sewing machine has therefore remained at the core of garment manufacturing. Important challenges could be found in the standardization of sizes, but the most salient factor of change was the advent of fashion for all. Fashionable garments were a luxury at the beginning of the century. They gradually democratized from the interwar period onwards, as the example of the US garment manufacturing industry shows. This industrial model broke with the tradition of the Paris haute couture firm, where all the operation from the design to the sales of the garment took place under the 70

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‘Armani Pivots to Produce Medical Overalls’, Business of Fashion, 26 March 2020. Priya Kanchandani, ‘Pandemic Production: When Design Is a Matter of Life or Death’, The Guardian, 6 June 2020.

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same roof. In comparison, the US manufacturers contracted or subcontracted specialized operations to ever smaller workshops who competed for orders, resulting in a pressure on wages and on workers. The garments produced in such workshops were then sold to retailers who most often then put their own brand names on them. The US garment industry produced garments in a wide array of qualities and price points, aligned with the aim of delivering fashion for all. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, a process of relocation gradually took place. The relocation of the most important parts of garment manufacturing to ever lower cost countries has further contributed to lower the price of garments during the twentieth century, reaching unprecedented production of low-cost, throwaway garments in a largely deregulated garment industry against a backdrop of neoliberal political regimes. The centres of garment production shifted over the course of the twentieth century from Western countries to the Global South, to Asia, and more recently towards Africa which has been deemed by observers to be the ‘last frontier’ of the garment industry. A major innovation in the industry, with the adaptation of the methods of just-in-time and of IT tools to manage consumers’ purchases, has accelerated the pace of change and manufacture of fashion industries to an unprecedented level. This has resulted in an even greater human cost than in the previous century, when social observers and activists had already sent warning signals about difficult labour conditions. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a new and powerful disruptor to an industry that was already in crisis.

select bibliography Barrett, Paul M. and Dorothée Baumann-Pauly, Report: Made in Ethiopia: Challenges in the Garment Industry’s New Frontier (New York: New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, 2019). Blaszczyk, Regina L. and Véronique Pouillard, ‘Fashion as Enterprise’, in Regina L. Blaszczyk and Véronique Pouillard (eds.), European Fashion: The Creation of a Global Industry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

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v e´ r o n i q u e p o u i l l a r d Coffin, Judith E., The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Daves, Jessica, Ready-Made Miracle: The American Story of Fashion for the Millions (New York: Putnam, 1967). Doublot, Camille, La protection légale des travailleurs de l’industrie du vêtement (Paris: L. Larose, 1899). Edgerton, David, The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2007). Goldstein, Gabriel M. and Elizabeth L. Greenberg (eds.), A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry, 1860–1960 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press and Yeshiva University Museum, 2012). Green, Nancy L., Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and in New York (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Hall, Max (ed.), Made in New York: Case Studies in Metropolitan Manufacturing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). Meiklejohn, Helen E., ‘Section VI, Dresses: The Impact of Fashion on a Business’, in Walton Hamilton (ed.), Price and Price Policies (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938). Montagné-Villette, Solange, Le Sentier. Un espace ambigu (Paris: Masson, 1990). Palmer, Alexandra, Dior: A New Look, a New Enterprise (1947–1957) (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2009). Roshco, Bernard, The Rag Race: How New York and Paris Run the Breakneck Business of Dressing American Women (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, Inc., 1963). Soyer, Daniel (ed.), A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization, and Reform in New York City’s Garment Industry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

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PRODUCING AND PREDICTING FASHION IN TWENTIETHCENTURY AMERICA AND EUROPE regina lee blaszczyk In a bold cultural move, some style-conscious American activists of the twenty-first century have engaged with the material history of the civil rights movement (1954–68) to make a powerful statement about clothing, class, and community. Whether commemorating historic 1960s marches or fighting for racial justice as part of Black Lives Matter (BLM), activists have taken to the streets in their ‘Sunday best’: sharply tailored suits for the men, and fancy party dresses for the women. Casting aside the oversized t-shirts, gym shorts, and baseball caps that have become synonymous with street style, elegant protesters have looked back to the 1960s when the dapper Dr Martin Luther King Jr (1929–1968), the future US Congressman John Lewis (1940–2020), and countless other American activists proudly embraced the dress code of respectability that earmarked white middle-class culture of the modern era.1 King and his cohort had in part hoped to advance social uplift and political change by dressing the part (Figure 36.1). By extension, the vintage fashion choices of a discrete group of twenty-first-century protesters is a declaration about the material world that goes beyond the phenomenon known as ‘passing’. Like the protesters before them, these activists have consciously and carefully reinterpreted modern dress codes to suit their individual needs, collective circumstances, and social justice agenda. 1

Vanessa Friedman, ‘The Dress Codes of the Uprising’, The New York Times, 16 June 2020.

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Figure 36.1 Activists in the civil rights movement, such as these protesters in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, embraced the dress code of respectability that hallmarked the modern era. Protesters in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 28 August 1963, LC-U9-10364–37, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

The judicious embrace of vintage dress codes by twenty-firstcentury social justice activists is testimony to the power of memory and the lingering influence of a modern moment in the fashion system. The years between 1870 and 1970 were a transformative period for fashion producers and apparel consumers in America and Europe. During the Second Industrial Revolution, Paris couturiers and London tailors set trends for the wealthiest consumers, but a combination of social, cultural, and economic factors challenged the hegemony of elitist styling and allowed for the dissemination of fashion to a broader swath of society. Business enterprise welcomed the expanded markets that sprang from changing demographics, the rising standard of living, and consumers’ hunger for affordable fashion that signalled middle-class respectability. The

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end result was the triumph of everyday fashion for the mass market. The ascendency of mass-market fashion was a tsunami that swept across the transatlantic world. The phenomenon drew sustenance from five interrelated developments: (1) the rationalization of the ready-to-wear industry and the growth of regional production centres that developed signature regional looks; (2) changes to the distribution system that downplayed the role of wholesalers and empowered retailers to exert sway over consumer tastes; (3) improved mechanisms for the dissemination of information about colour and style trends, both within the fashion trade and in the consumer domain; (4) the introduction of man-made and synthetic fibres and the growing voice of the textile and chemical companies that produced them; and (5) the rising tide of individualism that encouraged consumers to modify top-down prescriptions to create their own personalized style statements. This chapter explores those developments.

respectability and ready-to-wear Industrialization brought enormous social, cultural, and economic change to the Western world and laid the foundation for the rise of mass-market fashion. Britain led the way with the modernization of the textile industry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The giant fabric mills of Manchester, England, were inexorably linked to the cotton fields of the American South through transatlantic trade networks and slave labour. While the American Civil War (1861–5) led to the abolition of Southern slavery, the Reconstruction era (1865–77) introduced a new system of agricultural peonage that sustained Southern agriculture and the lucrative cotton trade.2 As the British-led First Industrial Revolution yielded to the Second Industrial Revolution in the midnineteenth century, Germany and the United States took the reins. A broad swath of consumer goods achieved wider circulation and greater cultural currency, among them, everyday fashion. 2

Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014).

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The Second Industrial Revolution coincided with major political and demographic transformations, including population shifts within Europe and the mass exodus of poor and persecuted ethnic groups to America. In particular, the European political upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century – the uprisings of 1848, the Crimean War (1853–6), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) – put a tremendous strain on populations of Central Europe, and spurred decades of mass migration to Western Europe and North America. Jewish immigrants from commercial centres like Berlin brought their talents as skilled tailors to manufacturing cities such as Paris, France; Leeds and London in the United Kingdom; and Boston, Cincinnati, New York, and Philadelphia in the United States.3 This mass migration coincided with the spread of the culture of respectability, which prescribed certain genteel norms for people who wanted to ‘fit in’ to white mainstream Euro-American culture. Industrialization and urbanization encouraged the development of a ‘new’ middle class of professionals – accountants, bank clerks, telegraphers, schoolteachers, factory managers, and the like – who joined the ‘old’ middle class of physicians, bankers, mayors, business owners, and professors. Nearly everyone – the stable ethnic communities of Europe and North America, free Blacks in the United States, migrants who traced their roots to Eastern and Southern Europe – aspired to achieve some degree of gentility and climb the social ladder into the middle class. Consumers displayed their awareness of respectability by showing good manners, by selecting certain types of furnishings for their homes, and by wearing the right set of clothes on their backs.4 3

4

Claudia Brush Kidwell and Margaret C. Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974); Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-toWork: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Katrina Honeyman, Well Suited: A History of the Leeds Clothing Industry, 1850–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Phyllis Dillon, A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry (New York: Yeshiva University Museum, 2005); Gabriel M. Goldstein and Elizabeth E. Greenberg (eds.), A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry, 1860–1960 (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2012). Regina Lee Blaszczyk, American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009).

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The widespread acceptance of respectability as an aspirational norm stimulated the demand for affordable, presentable clothing. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the garment industries of Britain, the United States, and Central Europe modernized to accommodate the new genteel market, and in turn, helped to shape the appetite for middle-class apparel. Entrepreneurs adapted labour-saving methods that were developed for the rapid production of military uniforms to civilian clothing. The sewing machine, an American invention, was installed in garment factories, workshops, and homes around the world. An expanded outwork system, whereby capitalists paid workers to sew up garments at home, sidestepped the overheads associated with factory production and helped to reduce the retail price of clothes. Jewish entrepreneurs facilitated the transition from handcraft to mass production, sometimes as outwork capitalists, as the proprietors of small tailor shops, and ultimately as the owners of garment factories. Menswear manufacturers used the sewing machine and the division of labour to generate a high volume of stylish garments that met the expectations of male consumers striving for gentility. In menswear, the dark wool suit worn with a crisp white shirt and a starched white collar, most famously sold under the Arrow brand, became the sartorial symbol of middle-class respectability up and down the social ladder5 (Figure 36.2). The womenswear market was slower to modernize no matter where, but this was particularly the case in Britain and France. Most women sewed simple garments themselves and relied on their neighbourhood dressmaker for more complex items such as the tight-fitting bodices or blouses of the period. By 1900, however, the average urban consumer in the United States and Germany was dressed mostly in ready-made attire. By this time, Jewish immigrants in industrial cities around America had adapted the methods of menswear tailoring to ladies’ apparel. As more women took jobs in stores and offices, they needed workappropriate clothing – apparel that was attractive, affordable, practical, and washable. The American commercial artist Charles 5

Christopher Breward, The Suit: Form, Function and Style (London: Reaktion Books, 2016).

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Figure 36.2 The entrepreneur John Wanamaker, dressed in a starched white collar and dark business suit, against the backdrop of his 1911 skyscraper department store in Philadelphia. Men of America: John Wanamaker ‘Merchant Prince’ (Chicago: Stevens-Davis Co., 1928), cover. Author’s collection.

Dana Gibson (1867–1944) captured the vogue of the times in his magazine sketches of the ‘Gibson Girl’, a Victorian office worker in the stylish outfit of the moment: a man-tailored jacket and skirt with a handsome, feminized ‘shirtwaist’ or blouse (Figure 36.3). Few real-life Gibson Girls knew that low-paid immigrant workers made their clothes in crowded sweatshops or tenements until 1911 when press coverage of the infamous Triangle shirtwaist factory

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Figure 36.3 The Gibson Girl image created by the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson embodied an idealized vision of white middle-class American womanhood. The anonymous artist who designed this postcard advertising a glove sale at Marshall Field & Company in Chicago in 1905 emulated the iconic look of the Gibson Girl. Author’s collection.

fire in New York exposed the dark side of the Second Industrial Revolution.6 Still, as capitalism matured, the average fashion consumer became ever more dissociated from the origins of the things that she used every day – while growing more accustomed to browsing through the shops for commonplace necessities like 6

David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).

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soft kid gloves, occasional luxuries like fresh ribbons for a bonnet, or major wardrobe updates like a new Easter coat.

new ways to sell mass-market fashion Classic cultural histories of shopping have focused on the large, high-end urban department stores of the Victorian and Edwardian periods as palaces of consumption that tempted shoppers with a pantheon of luxuries, from pianos and oil paintings to apparel, shoes, hats, and other fashion accessories.7 More recently, however, historians have examined the role of chain stores, or multiples, in the dissemination of fashion. This research has considered Montague Burton, a menswear manufacturer in Leeds, England, that distributed suits through its own Burton stores on the high street; Marks and Spencer Ltd, a British penny bazaar that diversified into family apparel; and C&A, a Dutch-German chain that sold practical stylish clothing to shoppers in Europe, Britain, and very briefly, the United States.8 The chains coexisted with department stores, haberdasheries, tailors, dressmakers, milliners, shoe shops, dress boutiques, catalogue houses, and other apparel retailers. The proliferation of stores created an atmosphere of abundance and availability, a fulsome, sensual shopping experience that taught consumers to think about clothing as an affordable luxury that could be used to express personal identity and middle-class respectability. The factories and workshops of the Second Industrial Revolution were in part clustered in cities, many of which became fashion centres. Historians have studied the four major ‘fashion cities’ revered for their design prowess after the Second World War – 7

8

Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). E. M. Sigsworth, Montague Burton: The Tailor of Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Rachel Worth, Fashion for the People: A History of Clothing at Marks & Spencer (Oxford: Berg, 2007); Mark Spoerer, C&A: A Family Business in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, 1911–1961 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2016).

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London, New York, Paris, and Tokyo – with some reference to Florence, Milan, and Rome.9 Today, Paris is celebrated as the world’s fashion capital because of the presence of Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and other global luxury brands, while London is revered as an innovator in street styles. But the focus on cities associated with brilliant brands and saucy subcultures belies the deep, rich history of everyday fashion and the secondary fashion cities that helped to promote it. During the Second Industrial Revolution, London was part of a national and international fashion ecosystem that included dozens of major clothing production centres. Garment manufacturers in London’s East End competed with firms around the United Kingdom for a share of the British ready-to-wear market. The textile hubs of Manchester and Leeds in the United Kingdom were home to the distinctive, nationally recognized ‘Northern style’ in ladies’ fashion.10 As the home of both Burton and its rival Joseph Hepworth & Son, Leeds led Britain in the production and distribution of popular menswear, but its factories also made large quantities of affordable ready-to-wear garments for women and children. Manufacturing hubs elsewhere in Europe and America followed a similar path to become regional fashion centres. Central Europe had secondary fashion cities such as Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and Zürich, among others. In the United States, New York City was the largest apparel producer, but there were significant regional manufacturing clusters in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Rochester, and other industrial cities.11 Many textile and apparel centres had busy retail districts that catered to the rising demand for respectable attire for men, women, and children. Locally made clothing found a ready market in the downtown stores, and a combination of local pride and consumer aspirations stimulated the demand for fashion. For example, Boston, Massachusetts, identified itself as a regional shopping 9

10

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Christopher Breward and David Gilbert (eds.), Fashion’s World Cities (Oxford: Berg, 2006). Christine Boydell, Horrockses Fashion: Off-the-Peg Style in the ’40s and ’50s (London: V&A Publishing, 2010); Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Fashionability: Abraham Moon and the Creation of British Cloth for the Global Market (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). See Chapter 35 by Véronique Pouillard in this volume.

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mecca for everyone in New England, with a thronging downtown at Washington Street where stores stocked all the new fabrics and fashions made in the local mills or shipped in from New York. In Britain, Michael Marks, a Jewish immigrant from the Polish lands, started his penny bazaar in Leeds, but his company, Marks and Spencer Ltd, eventually set up headquarters first in Manchester and then in London for greater proximity to wholesalers and access to a larger consumer market. Regardless of their size, many fashion cities had strong communications sectors that supported the retail trade. Printers, publishers, and advertising agencies helped to disseminate all of the style gossip with circulars, posters, trade cards, magazines, and newspapers. In the United States in particular, local newspapers developed a symbiotic relationship to local stores, with the press relying heavily on revenues from the retailers who, on a daily basis, paid nicely to place full-page advertisements illustrated with sketches of ladies’ fashions. A vignette of one American fashion city – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – provides insight into the regional and international dimensions of style creation and clothing distribution in the modern era. Centrally located on the East Coast between New York and Washington, Philadelphia was the largest textile city in America, home to countless fabric and apparel factories. Before the age of the internal combustion engine and petrol-powered cars and buses, consumers from around the mid-Atlantic region could easily travel to downtown Philadelphia via a well-developed regional railway network. A major freshwater port since the colonial era, the city gained traction as a regional fashion centre with the founding of Oak Hall, a ready-made clothing store for men and boys operated by the partners Wanamaker & Brown starting in 1861. After amassing a fortune making soldiers’ uniforms during the Civil War, John Wanamaker (1838–1922) hooked his star onto the newest promotional idea of the Victorian era: the Great Exhibition. Wanamaker joined other Philadelphia entrepreneurs to plan a world’s fair, the Centennial Exposition of 1876, to honour America’s hundredth birthday, and just in time for the festivities, he opened the Grand Depot, a cavernous store right in the city centre. The Grand Depot stocked merchandise of such quantity and variety that it is generally considered to be the first department store in America. For our

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Figure 36.4 Middle-class shoppers wearing respectable attire line up to see the latest ready-to-wear apparel for men, women, and children at one of John Wanamaker’s stores in central Philadelphia. Postcard, 1870s. Author’s collection.

purposes, it is salient to note that all of John Wanamaker’s clothing stores sold ready-to-wear clothing produced in his own factories around the city (Figure 36.4). In 1911, Wanamaker made the strategic decision to reach upmarket when he replaced the Grand Depot with a gargantuan skyscraper store designed by the office of the renowned Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham (1846– 1912). (Around the same time, Wanamaker’s great rival, Marshall Field, also invested in a new Burnham-designed skyscraper store in Chicago, the shopping mecca of the American Midwest.) Architectural amenities included electric lighting, elevators, display windows, restaurants, tearooms, concert halls, and the world’s largest organ. The new John Wanamaker facility – a true palace of consumption – dominated downtown Philadelphia and was acknowledged to be the most prestigious shopping destination on the East Coast (Figure 36.2).12 In terms of fashion, the John Wanamaker store became the go-to destination for wealthy shoppers and for middle-class strivers with 12

Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Selling Fashion: Retailing and Consumer Capitalism in the Transatlantic World (work in progress).

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enough discretionary income to emulate the upper crust. Philadelphia socialites – motivated to out-dress each other at debutante events, dinner parties, lunch at their country clubs, tea at their downtown clubs, the opera, and the symphony – shopped there. The store imported the latest Paris couture gowns, showcased the originals at invitation-only events, and filled its salons with spin-offs made by its own factories. Back in 1880, John Wanamaker had become the first American retailer to open a Paris buying office for sourcing ladies’ coats, wraps, and cloaks from Paris, Berlin, and other European fashion cities. The store enlarged its Paris office over the years. By 1899, the Wanamaker Paris Bureau inhabited a large facility at 44, rue des Petites Ècuries, an old mansion nestled among the wholesalers of the 10th arrondissement, from whence it served as a ‘watch-tower’ for Paris fashion.13 Emulation was the engine of modern consumer society, and it was not long before numerous Philadelphia retailers copied John Wanamaker’s display techniques, pricing policies, and merchandising strategies. By the First World War, downtown Philadelphia was filled with department stores and clothing shops that catered to all different market segments. Department stores like Gimbel Brothers, Lit Brothers, and Strawbridge & Clothier targeted the old middle class of lawyers and doctors and the new middle class of white-collar professionals, while Frank & Seder and N. Snellenburg & Company catered to working-class shoppers. Recent immigrants and Black customers patronized smaller downtown shops, market stalls, and neighbourhood stores that helped them dress the part on a budget. The Philadelphia story is instructive for what it tells us about geography and space, the symbiotic relationship between production and distribution, and the importance of respectability as a driving force for retail innovation in the modern fashion system.14 As the white-collar class expanded, menswear manufacturers in Leeds and in Rochester, New York, diversified into retail distribution with their own chain stores. In the ladies’ trade, the Paris-led 13

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Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores: Jubilee Year 1861–1911 (Philadelphia: John Wanamaker, 1911). Blaszczyk, Selling Fashion.

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vogue for simplified lines, which came to the fore in the years before the First World War, spawned the growth of ready-to-wear chain stores on main street. The pages of Women’s Wear, the major newspaper for American retailers, were filled with reports on countless regional and national fashion chains, many of which have closed their doors. Two companies had better luck than most. In 1918 in New York City, one shirtwaist maker established a chain called Lerner Shops to retail its ready-to-wear items at affordable prices. Lerner Shops eventually traded as Lerner New York and then New York & Company, selling youthful styles to high-school students and urban office workers. Founded in New York in 1904, Lane Bryant started out selling maternity wear but quickly diversified into ‘stout’ sizes for the mature figure. Managers at Lane Bryant studied women’s body measurements, developed reliable sizes for large and tall women, and dominated the ‘plus’ market into our own time.15 Both of these national fashion chains successfully transformed themselves into suburban mall stores in the late twentieth century but have recently experienced major setbacks and closures due to the rise of online shopping and the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides regional and national chains, another type of clothing retailer – the large fashion speciality store – appeared on the East Coast of the United States in the early 1900s. One such innovator was William Filene’s Sons Company, established in Boston in 1912. In an advertising pamphlet, the store explained what made it distinctive: ‘Filene’s is NOT a Department Store. Filene’s sells almost entirely wearing apparel and accessories, grouped in small specialty shops. It is probably the largest store in America devoted to the personal outfitting of women, children and men.’16 Other retailers emulated the Filene’s model, opening large multi-level stores that only sold fashion and accessories. Prominent names included Lord & Taylor, which moved from lower Manhattan to Fifth Avenue in 1914; Bergdorf Goodman, which opened a Fifth Avenue location in 1914; and Saks Fifth Avenue, founded in 1924. While the New York stores homed in on upmarket shoppers, 15 16

Ibid. William Filene’s Sons Company, What Is Personal Service? (Boston: William Filene’s Sons Company, n.d.), brochure, author’s collection.

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Filene’s catered to consumers at a range of price points to attract customers from all around the New England region.17 Astute European businesses tuned in to the fact that the United States was setting the pace in everyday fashion. In the 1920s, executives from Marks and Spencer Ltd visited America to learn from the retail scene as they planned the diversification of their penny bazaar. Within a few short years, the company was selling ready-made apparel for the entire British family in bright modern stores that had been updated along American lines. Following the American example, Marks and Spencer Ltd also established a testing laboratory that had oversight for ensuring that all of its merchandise, including everyday fashion, met the highest standards for quality.18 After the Second World War, other Europeans ventured abroad to study American modernity. They wanted to see for themselves the squeaky-clean chain stores filled with glamorous Hollywoodinspired ready-to-wear and to get tips on merchandising innovations such as standardized sizes, popular pricing, and market segmentation. One enthusiastic student of American retailing was the Swedish entrepreneur Erling Persson, who went on a reconnaissance mission to the United States in 1947. Persson returned home determined to emulate American practices and set up a small shop called Hennes, or ‘Hers’, to sell affordable ready-to-wear made by Swedish factories. By mid-century, American fashion retailing had thus established a strong influence in Europe, most notably serving as the template for the Stockholm-based global brand today known as H&M.19

predicting fashion futures The modernization of apparel production and distribution generated the need for better communication networks among the fashion trades. This business-to-business (B2B) function was largely 17

18 19

Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ‘The Rise and Fall of European Fashion at Filene’s in Boston’, in Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Véronique Pouillard (eds.), European Fashion: The Creation of a Global Industry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 170–200. Blaszczyk, Selling Fashion. Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, ‘H&M: How Swedish Entrepreneurial Culture and Social Values Created Fashion for Everyone’, in Blaszczyk and Pouillard (eds.), European Fashion, 201–19.

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invisible to the public eye, and until recently, has not been examined within fashion studies. For much of the Second Industrial Revolution, wholesale cloth distributors like the mammoth drapery warehouses near St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London acted as the major intermediaries between textile mills and commercial fabric buyers (Figure 36.5). The drapers tracked trends among the Paris couture houses and the London high-end tailors for the benefit of their customers – the haberdasheries, milliners, tailor shops, and apparel factories that purchased fabric, feathers, buttons, and other soft goods needed for clothing production. We can imagine a knowledgeable drapery clerk telling a customer ‘The French couture favours eggshell blue for the spring’ or ‘Boucle weaves are making headway on Bond Street’. The customer was free to use the draper’s advice as they saw fit, perhaps mixing this trade gossip with information personally gathered by reading the newspapers and business journals, studying fashion magazines, browsing the shops, and sizing up consumers back home.20 The London drapers, however influential, were not the first businesses to provide trend advice. Some of the first forecasting businesses appeared in nineteenth-century Paris. In 1825, the French designer Victor Jean-Claude set up a studio to make sketches and procure Paris samples for textile mills in an isolated part of eastern France. By the 1850s, Victor and his brother François Claude ran an enlarged sampling bureau that sold information on the latest Paris trends to mills and design schools around France. Eventually, creative businesses throughout the transatlantic world – textile mills, garment workshops, milliners, lace makers, dressmakers, and retailers – subscribed to the J. Claude Frères service. Some businesses, like John Wanamaker, preferred to do their own investigations through their own Paris offices. But for the most part, it was cheaper for foreign firms to pay a fee to a Paris bureau for reports, sketches, and swatches rather than incur the

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Blaszczyk, Fashionability, chs. 3–4; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ‘What Do Baby Boomers Want? How the Swinging Sixties Became the Trending Seventies’, in Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs (eds.), The Fashion Forecasters: A Hidden History of Color and Trend Prediction (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 116–17.

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Figure 36.5 Nicholsons Ltd, located in the building with the clock, was one of dozens of drapery warehouses around St Paul’s Cathedral before this prosperous wholesale district in central London was largely destroyed by the Blitz in the Second World War. Postcard, 1911. Author’s collection.

expense of sending their designers, buyers, and merchandisers to Europe to check out the new styles.21 A parallel development is worth noting. The birth of synthetic textile dyes led the large German chemical companies, who by the 1870s dominated the global dyestuff trade, to perfect a new

21

Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs, ‘Beyond the Crystal Ball’, in Blaszczyk and Wubs (eds.), The Fashion Forecasters, 1–32.

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marketing tool: the shade card or colour card. Created to promote dyes, shade cards eventually took on a life of their own in the marketplace, becoming a major source of colour trend information within the global fashion business. Textile designers in Lyon, Manchester, and Lowell studied the German colour cards to learn of the last European colour trends. Eventually, local dye houses in industrial districts like Lyon and style bureaus like J. Claude Frères in Paris started to publish colour cards that showed the latest shades from Paris22 (Figure 36.6). Although the French invented colour forecasting, it was the Americans who, with their penchant for efficiency, rationalized and systemized the prediction process. The American organization that led the way was the Textile Color Card Association of the United States (the TCCA, later known as the Color Association of the United States), a trade group founded in New York City in 1914 shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. For decades, the American textile and garment industries had simply copied the colours shown in the French shade cards. But when transatlantic shipping slowed down during the First World War and the French cards disappeared, the TCCA transformed the business of information dissemination within the American fashion trades by introducing a set of colour management tools that addressed the specific needs of industry in the United States.23 The TCCA’s managing director, Margaret Hayden Rorke, looked to Paris for inspiration, but her principal objective was to provide American industry with colour management tools that suited the diverse tastes of a large, multicultural mass market. ‘Mrs Rorke’ (as she was known in the trade) had a lasting influence. She created a system of practical design tools – colour standards, seasonal colour forecasts, and occasional trend reports – that provided professionals in the American creative industries with guidance on 22 23

Ibid. Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ‘The Color Schemers: American Color Practice in Britain, 1920s–1960s’, in Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann (eds.), Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 193–4; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ‘The Rise of Color Forecasting in the United States and Great Britain’, in Blaszczyk and Wubs (eds.), The Fashion Forecasters, 35–62.

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Figure 36.6 Dye houses in the French textile manufacturing districts studied the latest Paris styles and issued colour forecasts based on them. This shade card shows the fashionable colours and colour combinations for spring 1899 from J.-B. Chambeyron Fils, a dyer in St Étienne and Lyon. Shade card, J.-B. Chambeyron Fils, Item 121, Inter-Society Color Council Records (Accession 2188), Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE 19807.

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long-term trends, seasonal style variations, and fads in popular culture. The TCCA’s colour management tools were widely used by creative firms, ranging from textile mills and fashion designers to automakers and chemical companies. The objective was not to run a colour cabal that manipulated consumer choice but to increase business efficiency in design-driven industries by disseminating reliable information on the new hues. Colour management, it was believed, would help American industry avoid the waste associated with making products in colours that nobody wanted to buy.24 Rorke and the TCCA watched others jump on the bandwagon for trend reporting and colour forecasting. In the United States in the 1920s, Tobé Coller Davis started the Fashion Report from Tobé, a service to American retailers who wanted Paris news before hit the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue.25 Emulation continued into the 1930s. Taking advice from Rorke during some of her European travels, British industrialists created a mirror-image twin to the TCCA called the British Colour Council and charged it with the mission to provide colour directions to their textile mills. In France, J. Claude Frères continued to sell its services internationally, but rival entrepreneurs like Fred Carlin, a textile engineer, set up a company that sold swatch books of Paris fabric samples. After the Second World War, the trend field grew more crowded as trade associations like the Committee for the Coordination of Fashion Industries, a French womenswear trade group, and the International Wool Secretariat, the public relations arm of the wool growers in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, ventured into colour forecasting. But the impact of Margaret Hayden Rorke and the TCCA should not be discounted. Today, whether they acknowledge it or not, colour services like Pantone LLC, Première Vision, and WGSN (formerly the Worth Global Style Network) create colour standards and predict colour trends for the global business environment using techniques that Rorke perfected in the modern era.26 24 25

26

See the items cited in the previous footnote. Véronique Pouillard and Karen Jamison Trivette, ‘Tobé Coller Davis: A Career in Fashion Forecasting in America’, in Blaszczyk and Wubs (eds.), The Fashion Forecasters, 63–85. Blaszczyk and Wubs, ‘Beyond the Crystal Ball’.

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miracle materials: a game changer From the 1920s through the 1960s, the rise of affordable fashion was greatly advanced by technical innovations in the textile and chemical industries. Until the First World War, the fabric industry relied heavily on four major natural fibres: cotton, wool, silk, and linen. While these materials had many advantages, the supply chain was unreliable because of the unpredictability of Mother Nature and the fluctuating prices of agricultural commodities. A major drought in Australia could kill thousands of sheep, curtail the wool supply, and put a major kink in the textile supply chain. In the nineteenth century, chemists started to experiment with alternative fibres that could be made from abundant natural materials like cotton and wood. Ultimately, these efforts generated a family of plant-based fibres that would be collectively known as ‘rayon’ from the mid-1920s onward. While early experiments on artificial fibres were conducted in France and Germany, the British textile industry soon jumped ahead due to first-mover advantages rooted in its leadership role in fibre management dating back to the First Industrial Revolution.27 The rayon age blossomed in Europe and North America alongside the growth of the ready-to-wear industries in Germany, Britain, and the United States during the interwar period. In the 1910s, the simplification of Paris styles combined with the wartime need for practical attire spurred the demand for large quantities of textile yarns to be used in knitted and woven fabrics. As skirts got shorter in the 1920s, there emerged a desire for inexpensive ladies’ stockings that looked and felt like silk at a fraction of the cost. The abandonment of the tight Victorian-style corset for looser undergarments further stimulated the demand for silky materials, but there simply was not enough natural silk to go around. The makers of the new artificial yarns stepped up to the plate.28 Within a few short years, it became clear that rayon was the fibre of the future, and the field grew crowded. The British silk maker 27

28

Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Synthetics Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024). Ibid.

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Courtaulds was the leader in artificial fibres, with manufacturing facilities in Great Britain and the United States. But the organic chemicals industry also sought to capitalize on the rayon boom, with countless firms rushing forward. By the late 1930s, the leading rayon-producing countries were Japan, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, all of which had advanced chemicals, textile, and garment industries.29 In the United States, the Viscose Company, a Courtaulds subsidiary, was the pre-eminent manufacturer of artificial silk for many years until new players crowed onto the field. One of the fiercest new entrants was E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, a chemicals manufacturer that diversified into textile fibres in 1920. Having made a fortune on explosives during the First World War, DuPont had enormous financial resources at its fingertips, along with some of the world’s best chemists, chemical engineers, product developers, and marketing experts. By the 1930s, skirmishes over who would dominate the rayon age exploded into a full-blown war. Inexpensive rayon dresses became the musthave fashion sensation of the Great Depression, spurred by the deflationary economy, price competition, and massive consumer advertising. In Britain, the testing laboratories at Marks and Spencer Ltd in central London collaborated with textile mills to develop high-quality rayon fabrics that went into dresses, lingerie, and other garments sold under the St Michael label. The rayon explosion continued during the Second World War as the major natural fibres – cotton, wool, and silk – were requisitioned for the military. With wool being reserved for blankets and soldiers’ uniforms, home-front consumers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were encouraged to ‘make do’ with stylish, colourful rayon fashions30 (Figure 36.7). Rayon continued to be popular in mass-market fashion well into the post-war era. A major shift away from first-generation artificial fibres occurred with the widespread adoption of newer synthetic materials in the 1960s. Nylon was the world’s first synthetic fibre, 29

30

Geoffrey Owen, The Rise and Fall of Great Companies: Courtaulds and the Reshaping of the Man-Made Fibres Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Blaszczyk, The Synthetics Revolution. Worth, Fashion for the People; Blaszczyk, The Synthetics Revolution.

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Figure 36.7 This ready-to-wear dress in British rayon fabric typified the practical, colourful everyday fashion sold on the high street by Marks and Spencer Ltd under the government’s utility clothing scheme between 1941 and 1952. T1941/49, The M&S Company Archive. © Marks and Spencer plc.

with DuPont in the United States leading the way with nylon 6.6 and I. G. Farben in Germany following with nylon 6 before the Second World War. While rayon was a plant-based textile, nylon was synthetized from chemicals, and as such, was often called a ‘test-tube’ fibre. At DuPont, nylon was born of a concerted effort in research and development (R&D) and chemical engineering to create a test-tube fibre that improved on silk and rayon in terms of appearance, durability, performance, and price. In 1939, DuPont publicized nylon to great fanfare at two world’s fairs – one in San Francisco, the second in New York City (Figure 36.8). Nylon was

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Figure 36.8 DuPont displayed nylon at the world’s fairs in San Francisco in 1938 and New York in 1939–40. In this publicity shot from the New York World’s Fair, a DuPont chemist and a fashion model dressed in an outfit made from DuPont fibres examine a pair of ladies’ nylon stockings against a backdrop of knitting machines. DuPont Company photograph, 1984259_121912_041, Box 12, Folder 21, DuPont Textile Fibers Product Information Photographs (Accession 1984.259), Audiovisual Collections and Digital Initiatives Department, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington DE 19807. Courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library.

touted as a new miracle material, the child of the science and technology that was so revered in modern times.31 31

Susannah Handley, Nylon: The Story of a Fashion Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Blaszczyk, The Synthetics Revolution.

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Building on nylon, chemicals manufacturers and fibre producers ventured deeper into laboratory science and chemical engineering to develop other synthetic fibres. British industry advanced the synthetics revolution when scientists at the Calico Printers’ Association (CPA) in Manchester invented Terylene polyester and researchers at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) worked to prepare the new fibre for commercialization during the Second World War. But DuPont stole the show and came to dominate global fibre production with a distinctive family of fibres that included viscose rayon, cellulose acetate, nylon, polyester, a mock wool called acrylic, and a stretchy material known as spandex. Besides its unparalleled scientific and engineering prowess, in the 1950s and 1960s DuPont enjoyed considerable advantages over the chemicals manufacturers of England, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, where industry had suffered major wartime devastation.32 The synthetics revolution latched on to the consumer boom that exploded in concert with post-war economic growth. While historians have studied DuPont as a leader in managerial innovation and R&D, the firm’s history as a marketing pioneer in textile fibres and fashion is less well documented.33 To promote the new world of synthetics, DuPont invested heavily in product development, consumer research, marketing, branding, and advertising. The goal was to educate textile designers, garment makers, retailers, home economics teachers, and consumers about its family of fibres. DuPont first undertook market research in the interwar years, conducting motivation studies on consumers’ tactile experiences with fabrics, and considerably expanded those efforts in the postwar era.34

32 33

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Blaszczyk, The Synthetics Revolution. Alfred D. Chandler Jr and Stephen Salsbury, Pierre S. du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith Jr, Science and Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Blaszczyk, The Synthetics Revolution; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ‘Styling Synthetics: DuPont’s Marketing of Fabrics and Fashions in Postwar America’, Business History Review, 80 (2006), 485–528.

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DuPont’s hefty expenditures on advertising and promotion helped to elevate the public image of synthetics in fabrics and fashions. During the interwar period, rayon makers had worked with the French couture houses to integrate man-made fibres into the Paris collections and publicized those designs in major fashion magazines. But these early rayon promotions paled next to the post-war efforts of DuPont, the Celanese Fibers Marketing Company, and other American synthetic fibre makers. In 1953, DuPont marketers entertained two prominent Paris couturiers – Christian Dior and Hubert de Givenchy – during their tours of the United States. The investment paid off. In 1954 and 1955 alone, Givenchy used DuPont’s Orlon acrylic in his prêt-à-porter (highend ready-to-wear) collections and in his designs for the American sweater manufacturer, Talbott Knitting Mills (not to be confused with the fashion chain Talbots). When the first International Congress of Man-Made Textiles met in Paris in 1954, the couture houses mounted runway shows featuring mannequins dressed in outfits made from ‘The Textiles of Tomorrow’. The couturiers were fully aware that synthetics were here to stay and that good fortune would come their way if they collaborated with fibre makers. Over the next two decades, DuPont fibres were a regular feature of prêt-à-porter and ready-to-wear clothing created in Paris, Milan, London, New York, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Dallas. The new designer synthetic fashions were widely promoted in North America and Europe through publicity photographs, press releases, advertisements, and other marketing materials (Figure 36.9). DuPont sales offices in New York, London, and Geneva served as liaisons to the textile industry, garment manufacturers, and the fashion press.35 The collaborations among DuPont fibre developers in Wilmington, DuPont publicists in New York, and high-end fashion creators in Paris benefited both the chemical company and the couture houses. The arrangement lent prestige to the synthetics revolution and enhanced the DuPont brand within the global 35

Blaszczyk, ‘Styling Synthetics’; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ‘Du Pont de Nemours: mode et révolution des textiles synthétiques’, in Dominique Veillon and Michèle Ruffat (eds.), La Mode des Sixties: L’entrée dans la modernité (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2007), 202–19.

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Figure 36.9 This Christian Dior ensemble for spring 1960, photographed in an upscale Paris neighbourhood with the Eiffel Tower in the distance, was sewn from French fabrics containing DuPont nylon. DuPont Company photograph of Christian Dior ensemble, 1984259_5792, Box 36, Folder 10, DuPont Textile Fibers Product Information Photographs (Accession 1984.259), Audiovisual Collections and Digital Initiatives Department, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington DE 19807. Courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library.

fashion business. Concurrently, the public relations effort infused cash-strapped European fashion creators with American dollars at a moment when the couture business was in free fall, enabling couturiers to capitalize on the cachet of American business on the heels of the celebrated Marshall Plan (1948–51). How did the collaboration affect the fashion choices of American consumers? In the United States, the socialite who pored over the women’s pages

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of the local newspaper saw photographs of the DuPont-couture ensembles juxtaposed with advertisements from downtown stores that sold copies of Paris originals. DuPont thereby helped to disseminate high-end European fashion in the United States, augmenting the efforts of highbrow fashion speciality stores like Neiman Marcus in Dallas and department stores like John Wanamaker in Philadelphia.36 But debutantes who needed party dresses were a small part of the vast American market. DuPont recognized that a broader audience for synthetic fashions could be found among Americans whose purchasing power had grown with post-war prosperity. In the mid-1950s, these groups included young white-collar and bluecollar families in new suburban developments, hyphenatedAmericans in the old urban neighbourhoods, and homemakers in the small towns of rural America. By the 1960s, the market further divided to include high-school students, college students, Black urban consumers, and men from different ethnic groups who wanted to distance themselves from the corporate look exemplified by the film The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956) and, more recently, by Don Draper in the Mad Men cable television series (2007–15). DuPont applied market research to the problem. The prominent DuPont consultant Ernest Dichter (1907–91), one of the fathers of motivation research, identified men of Mediterranean descent – Italian-American working-class consumers – as a distinctive group who appreciated expressive, stylish bodyhugging clothing. While British observers had compared London dandies to peacocks, it was Dichter who, speaking to a convention of menswear retailers on behalf of DuPont in February 1966, coined the term ‘peacock revolution’ to describe the American male’s newfound interest in fashion.37 There was no more flamboyant peacock than the actor John Travolta who, as the fictional Brooklyn stud Tony Manero, slithered across the disco dance 36 37

Blaszczyk, The Synthetics Revolution; Blaszczyk, Selling Fashion. Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ‘Ernest Dichter and the Peacock Revolution: Motivation Research, the Menswear Market and the DuPont Company’, in Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries (eds.), Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 126–39.

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floor in the Hollywood box-office hit film Saturday Night Fever (1977). The fibre makers, often overlooked within fashion history, played a significant role in changing the materiality of everyday apparel – and the ways in which the fashion business thought about market segments.38

the post-war consumer boom: ready-to-wear in america, britain, and france In the post-war era, the ready-to-wear industries in the United States and Great Britain were running full throttle. At the start of this period, the French haute couture houses still lorded over handmade luxury fashion from their swank Paris salons on the avenue Montaigne and other posh addresses. The couture business enjoyed a brief renaissance after 1947 when Christian Dior introduced the New Look, but by the time of his death in 1957, French dressmaking for the upper crust was in a downward spiral.39 Ready-to-wear was the fashion of the future, as became crystal clear in the two decades between 1950 and 1970. The French continued to promote Paris couture as a national treasure, even as economic and social changes eroded the market for custom-fitted garments for the wealthy few. In the 1950s, admirable efforts to launch a French ready-to-wear industry bubbled up in Paris and in Côte d’Azur, the latter focused on resort clothes. A group of Parisian garment manufacturers had visited the United States to study the American fashion industry under the auspices of the Marshall Plan.40 One trade association, L’Association des Maisons Françaises de Couture en Gros, was particularly keen to develop an export business and used the label Trois Hirondelles (Three Swallows) to promote French ready-towear around Europe and in the United States.41 By 1959, sales of 38 39

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Blaszczyk, The Synthetics Revolution. Véronique Pouillard, ‘Recasting Paris Fashion: Haute Couture and Design Management in the Postwar Era’, in Blaszczyk and Pouillard (eds.), European Fashion, 35–62. Didier Grumbach, History of International Fashion (Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2014). ‘French Apparel Trade Looks to Expanded Market in U.S.’, Women’s Wear Daily (hereafter cited as WWD), 9 February 1951.

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French ready-made fashion had picked up, and more couturiers had ventured into prêt-à-porter. Around this time, the French garment industry sponsored La Semaine du Vêtement Féminin, a semiannual women’s clothing week, where foreign retail buyers could see ready-to-wear lines made in Paris and Côte d’Azur. These modest efforts showed that some French fashion producers were awakening to modern life.42 But the French ready-to-wear industry of the 1950s and early 1960s foundered, a victim of traditions associated with luxury production and the stark realities of the post-war economy. Strapped for cash, most French women still sewed at home or looked to a neighbourhood dressmaker for the few stylish items in their wardrobes. Despite their noble ambitions, the Three Swallows, dependent on handicraft workshops, could not sufficiently reduce production costs and sell their output at competitive prices. The United States was still widely acknowledged to be the world’s ready-to-wear leader in terms of productivity, volume, quality, marketing, and retailing. America had the world’s largest, most advanced garment industry, serving an internal market of 180 million people by 1960. One cannot generalize about the typical American fashion consumer because of the variety of tastes and lifestyles within the United States. The vast American market was segmented by overlapping factors such as locale, climate, income, occupation, age, class, race, ethnicity, marital status, and subculture. The garment district clustered around Seventh Avenue in New York was the major design and production centre, accounting for two-thirds of the clothing industry’s output. In descending order, secondary womenswear manufacturing clusters were located in major commercial cities from coast to coast: Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Dallas, Cleveland, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and Miami.43 Chicago, New York, and Rochester were among the cities with major menswear sectors. The Americans had perfected techniques for the quantity production of ladies’ garments, and over the first part of the twentieth century, they had evolved a distinctive style of casual clothing. 42 43

‘France: What You Need to Know’, WWD, 28 September 1959. ‘New York Dress Market Dominant, Survey Shows’, WWD, 8 December 1954.

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American ‘sportswear’ was suited to an active lifestyle that involved golf, tennis, horseback riding, bicycling, walking, and hiking. In the interwar years, the growing number of high-school and college students had created a demand for practical everyday clothing that could be worn to class, the library, dance parties, and football games. In the post-war years, Los Angeles and Miami developed new casual clothing styles appropriate for beaches and resorts, but Midwestern apparel centres like Cleveland produced sportswear that could be worn every day in a range of climates, from the bone-chilling upper Midwest to the sweltering Texas– Mexico border.44 The most important sportswear company in Cleveland was Bobbie Brooks Inc., which cornered the market for teen fashions with a system of inexpensive colour-coordinated separates called ‘go-togethers’. Sales went from $9.8 million in 1952 to $147 million in 1970. The high-school student who spent her weekly allowance on a Bobbie Brooks wardrobe was investing in practicality and versatility. She could mix and match five or six separates, changing the combination of blouse, sweater, skirt, trousers, jacket, and accessories for a different look each day45 (Figure 36.10). In a tribute to American manufacturing prowess, Bobbie Brooks had adapted Henry Ford’s concept of interchangeable parts to casual clothing to become one of the best-known apparel brands in the United States. In doing so, Bobbie Brooks helped to make separates into a hallmark of American style. The British fashion business was built on a model that sat squarely between the luxury orientation of France and the volume production of the United States. With a strong history of ready-made tweed tailoring, the British admired American styling and production methods – and were eager to learn more. 44

45

Deirdre Clemente, ‘Made in Miami: The Development of the Sportswear Industry in South Florida, 1900–1960’ Journal of Social History, 41/1 (2007), 127–48; William R. Scott, ‘California Casual: Lifestyle Marketing and Men’s Leisurewear’, 1930–1960’, in Regina Lee Blaszczyk (ed.), Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 169–86. Bobbie Brooks, Inc., Annual Report for the Year Ended April 30, 1961, 17, 19, and Bobbie Brooks, Inc., Annual Report 1970, Year Ended April 30, 1970, 1, both in folder 3, box 1, Ms. 5157, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio.

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Figure 36.10 Bobbie Brooks Inc. targeted the teen market in post-war America with mix-and-match sportswear separates. This advertisement for ‘the many looks of Bobby Brooks’ appeared in Glamour magazine in August 1964. Author’s collection.

During the golden age of Hollywood in the 1930s, the energetic British garment manufacturer Percy Trilnick visited the United States, and back in London, set up a firm for importing

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American frocks.46 At the start of the Second World War at the urging of the Board of Trade, British garment makers sent trade missions to the United States to study the fashion scene and see what could be emulated back in England, but these efforts were curtailed as the conflict accelerated.47 In the 1950s, the transatlantic exchanges resumed, with London ready-to-wear designers like Frederick Starke visiting the United States on a regular basis and large East End garment manufacturers like Steinberg & Sons setting up sales offices in the Seventh Avenue fashion district.48 On the textile end of things, British tweed makers established a strong presence in North America, which became one of their major export markets. Oozing stereotypical British-ness that appealed to Anglophiles, tweeds from Scotland and Yorkshire found ready customers among textile wholesalers and garment factories at the top end of the North American market.49 One fashion speciality retailer, Neiman Marcus in Dallas, showcased high-end British imports in some of its famous annual extravaganzas, the Fashion Fortnight.50 But the average British apparel manufacturer, straddled with high wages at home and hit with protective tariffs imposed by United States customs, was unable to meet the low price requirements of the American mass market. By the 1950s, Great Britain boasted the most highly developed ready-to-wear industry in Europe. The largest manufacturing clusters were in Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, and London, but garment makers had started to build new factories around Britain. Steinberg & Sons, whose 1904 origins can be traced to the immigrant Jewish garment industry of the East End, produced womenswear at factories in London, South Wales, and County Durham in northeast 46

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‘U.S. Shipments of Dresses to Britain Set New High’, WWD, 3 November 1937. ‘British Plan Sports Coat, Suit Showing in NY in August’, WWD, 5 July 1940; ‘First British Coat Shipment Due This Week’, WWD, 19 November 1940; Women’s Fashion Export Group, Minute Book, MSS222/APX/1/1, and Membership List, MSS222/APX/2/1, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, United Kingdom. ‘Steinberg & Sons (London & South Wales)’, Financial Times (hereafter cited as FT), 13 September 1956. Blaszczyk, Fashionability. 50 Blaszczyk, Selling Fashion.

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England. Steinberg hoped to expand exports, but foreign markets were a challenge as many nations, seeking to rebuild their own industries, imposed tariffs or import quotas. The bulk of Steinberg’s output was created for the British market and was sold in high-street department stores and dress shops under labels such as Alexon, Dellbury, and Youngset. In keeping with the British tailoring tradition, the mainstay of the Steinberg business consisted of women’s coats, suits, and skirts.51 The British demand for clothing started to change in the 1950s, under the influence of American films, magazines, and music, and with the rise of a new market segment: young working-class consumers. In 1956, the British sociologist Mark Abrams (1906–1994) published a landmark study on this group, noting how young men and women aged 15 to 34, mainly those from blue-collar backgrounds, used their spending money to buy snacks, music, and fashion. Before the Second World War, middle-class consumers had constituted 30 per cent of the population and accounted for two-thirds of retail clothing purchases. By 1955, the main consumer group for clothing was the blue-collar market segment, which spent £600,000 annually out of a national total of just over £1 million. On top of this, while young consumers accounted for only 35 per cent of the population, they bought 40 to 50 per cent of men’s ties, men’s shirts, women’s nylon stockings, and women’s foundation garments.52 Abrams’ study, and a follow-up report, were condensed and widely circulated in the British press. Although protective tariffs and restrictive quotas circumscribed international trade in the post-war years, nothing could prevent the British fashion industry from studying American business practices and copying them. One innovation from the United States that had a major impact on British apparel manufacturers was the American system of standardized sizes for ready-to-wear. We have already noted how the retailer Lane Bryant developed reliable sizes for fuller-figured ladies in the 1920s. Further efforts to quantify female measurements on the part of trade associations, home economics groups, and government agencies produced results. The 51 52

The history of Steinberg & Sons can be traced in the FT. Mark Abrams, ‘Spending on Clothes’, FT, 6 October 1956.

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Americans had better standardized sizes than anyone else, and the British were quick to study and emulate them.53 Notably, American sizing was adopted by Marks and Spencer Ltd as the high-street giant delved more deeply into apparel retailing during the 1950s. By the early 1960s, high-street retailers and fashion manufacturers were looking for ways to capitalize on the demographic changes identified by Mark Abrams. Out of this cauldron emerged the London Look of Carnaby Street and the King’s Road. The retail entrepreneur John Stephen is best known for turning Carnaby Street, a shabby West End thoroughfare, into a fashion mecca for devotees of the peacock revolution. Numerous young British designers made their reputations on the London Look, among them Roger Nelson, Foale and Tuffin, and Mary Quant. Quant is significant for her connection to Steinberg & Sons, the large London clothing manufacturer with ties to the American market, and for her own pioneering efforts to introduce youthful British style to the United States.54 The Quant-led British fashion invasion of North America predates the better-known Beatles-led British music invasion launched in 1964. In the autumn of 1960, Mary Quant and her husband and business partner Alexander Plunket Greene flew to America to check out the fashion scene. Two years later, the J. C. Penney Company, a major American retailer, asked a young executive named Paul Young, a Brit, to recruit design talent for an exciting new promotion on youth fashion. According to the recollections of one seasoned retailer who knew the London scene of the 1960s, Young spotted Quant’s designs in a Knightsbridge store and snatched her up for Penneys.55 Way back in 1902, James Cash Penney had established the J. C. Penney Company as a main street 53

54 55

The sizing problem, and efforts to resolve it, is well documented in WWD. See also Board of Trade, Women’s Measurements and Sizes: A Study Sponsored by the Joint Clothing Council Limited (London: HMSO, 1957); Geoffrey Henry, ‘Trade Lines’, The Maker-Up, 53 (October 1963), 856; Julia Felsenthal, ‘A Size 2 Is a Size 2 Is a Size 8’, Slate, 25 January 2012, at www .slate.com (accessed 2 September 2020). Jenny Lister (ed.), Mary Quant (London: V&A Publishing, 2019). Nigel French, interview with Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Philadelphia, PA, 11 April 2018.

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family clothing store for small towns west of the Mississippi River. Penneys continued along these lines until the 1950s, when a new chief executive, William M. Batten, reinvented the store to suit new post-war realities, including suburban growth and the buying power of the American teenager. In a widely publicized turnaround, Batten revamped and expanded Penneys into a cutting-edge national retailer for the American suburbs. Under his direction, Penneys opened stores in the new upmarket malls in East Coast suburbs, and in 1963, introduced edgy young fashions to rural consumers with a new mail-order catalogue. Batten’s fashion-first strategy included collaborations with young designers like Quant who created exclusive clothing lines for Penneys. She collaborated with Penneys, staff in New York and Seventh Avenue garment factories to adapt Mod British styles to the tastes and pocketbooks of middle America (Figure 36.11). Quant designed apparel for Penneys from 1962 to 1971 and extended her American influence by creating clothes for the Puritan Fashions Corporation, a New York garment manufacturer that ran a short-lived chain of boutiques called Paraphernalia.56 Fashion prediction also took a youthful, playful turn in the 1960s. Veteran trend spotters – the Color Association of the United States, Tobé reports, and Fred Carlin – were challenged by a group of young fashion intermediaries with a new approach to fashion prediction. The upstarts aimed not to report on accepted styles but to anticipate major trends before they appeared on the runway. Starting at mid-decade, young French entrepreneurs launched three new forecasting bureaus – Promostyl, Mafia, and Peclers Paris – that helped French industry learn from street styles. The Anglo-American innovator in trend forecasting was IM International, founded in London in 1968. Sizing up the hip fashions in boutiques on the King’s Road, IM International advised its American subscribers on the European looks that would next be in fashion. Whereas Tobé Coller Davis sent retailers lengthy descriptions of expensive Paris dresses and hats, IM International focused on trendy European subcultures and the possibility that youthful 56

Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ‘Doing Business in Transatlantic Fashion: The Experience of Mary Quant’, in Lister (ed.), Mary Quant, 110–21; Blaszczyk, Selling Fashion.

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Figure 36.11 J. C. Penney promoted the British Mod look as suitable for every American lifestyle. Here, a line of wool-nylon ready-to-wear designed by Mary Quant in London is shown with horses, riding tackle, and cacti on an arid Western ranch. Penneys catalogue, Fall–Winter 1967, verso cover. J. C. Penney Archive, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.

styles might have an impact on the middle-class closet. The IM trend forecasts described what people wore on the streets, in the discos, and on the beaches, and speculated on how elements of those looks might go mainstream. The trend watchers of the 1960s differed from Tobé in a significant way – they reported less and speculated a whole lot more. They relied on intuition – a ‘sixth sense’ – to anticipate the likely direction of fashion in the future.57 The era of high modernism – with its social hierarchy, 57

Blaszczyk, ‘What Do Baby Boomers Want?’

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trickle-down styles, prescriptions for respectability, and cultural engineering – had entered its twilight moment.

respectability in retreat Following the post-war expansion of consumer society, the massmarket fashion business of Europe and America entered a new phase in the 1970s. Changes to the global political economy played an important role, as did evolving cultural expectations that eroded the manners and norms of respectability. The full story of this sea change is beyond the scope of this study, but we bring this chapter to closure with a short reflection on everyday fashion at the end of modern times. In 1969, a research report commissioned by the British government examined the domestic ready-to-wear industry. The report praised the ‘greater fashion consciousness’ of British consumers that had emerged in the recent past. The researchers identified several contributing factors: rising disposable incomes; the amelioration of class differences; the consumer desire to express individuality; the garment industry’s greater attentiveness to young people, especially teenagers; the proliferation of boutiques on the high street and within department stores; and the emergence of professional designers interested in the mass market. The synthetics revolution had shaped consumer expectations by introducing easy-care clothing that reduced the burden of wardrobe maintenance. Chain stores had created appealing high-street merchandise by collaborating with garment factories. Retailers ruled the roost. When asked to name a favourite brand, the average consumer was tongue-tied – but she never forgot her favourite store. Marks and Spencer Ltd came out on top because of the ‘absolute reliability of their sizing’.58 British consumers had long relied on the Marks & Spencer brand for good-quality fashions at a modest price. For decades, the store adhered to a ‘Buy British’ policy that led it to source fashion merchandise from British manufacturers. But starting in the late 1960s, 58

Associated Industrial Consultants Ltd, Strategy for the British Clothing Industry (London: Economic Development Committee for the Clothing Industry, 1969), n.p.

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fierce competition on the high street forced many British retailers to look far and wide for lower-priced merchandise. In 1966, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) abolished import-export duties on many goods, creating an open market between member states , among them Portugal and Great Britain. High-street retailers turned to low-wage EFTA economies such as Portugal for cut-rate prices on ready-to-wear clothing, shoes, and accessories. A similar story played out throughout the West, intensifying into a cost-cutting frenzy as the twentieth century drew to a close. Domestic manufacturing was devastated in the powerhouse economies that had dominated the early days of the Second Industrial Revolution. The output and profitability of textile mills and clothing factories in Britain, Germany, and the United States took a nosedive. These transformations in the business sphere paralleled shifts in consumer values.59 The heyday of disposable ‘fast fashion’ lay in the distant future, but by the late 1960s, mass-market shoppers had started to think of apparel as a splurge rather than an investment. When Mark Abrams wrote about consumer choices in the mid-1950s, clothing was still a relatively expensive purchase, whether you were a Teddy Boy, a Scottish schoolteacher, a Welsh policeman, or a Yorkshire grandmother. But during the consumer explosion of the 1960s, rivalries among high-street retailers led to major price wars. Cheap highstreet fashion was coveted by easy-spenders, mainly the young. C&A Modes, a subsidiary of the German-Dutch chain C&A, fed the teen hunger for a fashion fix by sourcing cheap Mod clothes from makers in the East End of London and selling them to youngsters at rock-bottom prices.60 Across the English Channel, the French finally found their entrée to mass-market fashion. Back in the 1930s, the famous Printemps department store had established Prisunic, a mini department store that targeted budget shoppers. By the late 1950s, Prisunic had 223 stores scattered around France and North Africa and initiated an expansion plan built around emulating the American ‘democratized’ practice of ‘promoting ready-towear for the average consumer’. This effort gained more traction over the course of the 1960s.61 Meanwhile in the United States, 59 61

Ibid. 60 Blaszczyk, Fashionability. ‘The View from Paris: Nelly Rodi and the Early Days of French Trend Forecasting’, in Blaszczyk and Wubs (eds.), The Fashion Forecasters, 133.

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downtown retailers continued business as usual even as danger signs appeared in their peripheral vision, with discount stores, strip malls, and regional indoor shopping centres proliferating in the new car-oriented suburbs.62 Another disruption to the modern fashion system was the rise of the ‘designer brand’. In France, the surviving couture houses wisely acknowledged that their fortunes lay in fragrances, prêt-à-porter, luxury boutiques, and generally capitalizing on the founder’s name through licensing deals. Targeting the upper end of the mass market, Paris-based ready-to-wear innovators like Daniel Hechter helped to introduce French consumers to the concept of the designer brand.63 In the United States, new American designer brands infiltrated department stores and speciality fashion stores through aggressive marketing by entrepreneurs like Ralph Lauren, Anne Klein, and Gloria Vanderbilt. These designers thrived by putting their names on everything from men’s ties to practical office wear to form-fitting ladies’ jeans. By the late 1970s, consumers in America and Europe were learning to recognize fashion brands and were beginning to associate brand names with quality. The power of the mass-market fashion retailer was diminished in this process.64 The stylish consumer of the modern era who dressed in a genteel manner had assembled her respectable look by browsing through the shops, flipping through fashion magazines, watching Hollywood movies, and sharing glamour tips with her peers at work, school, social club, or church. In the 1970s, this modus operandi yielded sway to a more powerful, media-driven celebrity culture. To be sure, many consumers still appreciated the classic styles sold by department stores, chains, second-hard shops, and vintage fairs. But as the historian Christopher Lasch noted, an emerging ‘culture of narcissism’ that privileged self-indulgence over respectability gave birth to the experience-driven consumption of the postmodern era.65

62 63 65

Blaszczyk, American Consumer Society; Blaszczyk, Selling Fashion. Blaszczyk, Fashionability. 64 Blaszczyk, Selling Fashion. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978); Alexandra Palmer and

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Experience-driven consumption elevated celebrity culture to new heights, which had important repercussions for fashion. Whereas the Victorians had admired royalty and the moderns held Hollywood stars in esteem, the new type of celebrity culture – wherein people are simply famous for being famous – gained sway. Postmodern celebrity culture was exemplified by People, an American gossip magazine that hit newsstands in 1974, and by David Bowie’s Young Americans album of 1975, featuring the hit song ‘Fame’. The American primetime soap operas Dallas (1978–91) and Dynasty (1981–9) showcased the extravagant lifestyles of the rich and powerful, while music stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson, who owed their success to the rise of cable and MTV, further popularized glitz, glamour, and fame. Cable TV not only made actors and singers into superstars, but also turned fashion brands and their creators into global celebrities. The handsome actor Don Johnson, starring in the Miami Vice TV police drama (1984–90), wore Italian styles by Giorgio Armani that familiarized global viewers with the metrosexual look of European designer brands. The fanfare turned Armani into a fashion celebrity and created the demand for his brand.66 The designer brand was the ultimate material manifestation of the new cult of personality and global celebrity culture. A Ralph Lauren designer jacket was inherently no different from a St Michael jacket from a Marks & Spencer store with the exception of the logo of the polo player on the breast pocket of the designer jacket. Consumers who were uncertain about their place in postmodern society could anchor themselves to something solid by identifying themselves with a tribe, be it the celebrity of Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Liberty, Hugo Boss, or Gianni Versace. Another facet of postmodernity was reflected in the individualism of street styles like hippie, disco, Punk, and hip-hop. The regime of gentility, deeply rooted in European social hierarchy, slowly yielded its cultural authority to powerful globalizing forces. The changes in marketing and distribution that gained currency in the 1970s and 1980s paved the way for the bifurcated fashion system of the

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Hazel Clark (eds.), Old Clothes, New Looks: Second Hand Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2005). Blaszczyk, Fashionability; Blaszczyk, American Consumer Society.

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twenty-first century: global luxury brands for the super-rich and their emulators, and cheap disposable everyday fashion for everyone else.

summary In the century between 1870 and 1970, global industrial output, urbanization, and respectable everyday fashion grew hand-in-hand. This era witnessed the Second Industrial Revolution rise and fall throughout much of Europe and North America. Generations of economic and business historians have long associated this phase of industrialization with heavy industries like metalworking, electrification, food processing, and transportation, but a new generation of business historians has demonstrated that the creative industries associated with fashion also contributed significantly to the economy and culture.67 A heightened focus on novelty in product design emerged in response to the rising demand for affordable luxuries. Ever more textile mills, garment factories, millinery shops, and retail stores catered to consumers who embraced gentility and respectability as vehicles for improving their material circumstances and their social standing. People who sought acceptance within mainstream white, middle-class society looked to dress the part, and a host of businesses scurried to produce affordable everyday fashion to meet their needs. This chapter has discussed some of the most important actors in modern fashion production, prediction, and distribution, mainly focusing on business operations in the United States and United Kingdom. The modern fashion system, with its emphasis on affordable respectability, foremost depended on retailers – department stores, chain stores, and speciality shops – to bring ready-to-wear clothing, inexpensive shoes, whimsical millinery, costume jewellery, furs, and other fashion goods to main street and high street. Another important group of actors was the fibre and fabric makers that supplied cloth to the garment factories of New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Leeds, and London. And unbeknownst to the 67

See, for example, Blaszczyk (ed.), Producing Fashion; Blaszczyk and Pouillard (eds.), European Fashion.

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average shopper, the modern fashion system was populated by a slew of creative workers dedicated to managing the flow of style information among fashion enterprises, from creating shade cards for the French silk mills to publishing trend forecasts in Mod London. Without these business actors, the stiff white collar worn by the Arrow Man and the fancy hat perched atop the head of the Gibson Girl would not have been possible – and respectability would have been out of reach to the masses. The modern fashion system reached its apex in the decades after the Second World War, and soon thereafter, was challenged by new paradigms: youthful styles, experience-driven consumerism, the rise of designer brands, celebrity culture, disposable fashion, and globalization. By the twenty-first century, few teenage shoppers looking for a quick style fix at H&M or Boohoo had ever heard of the Gibson Girl, the once-ubiquitous symbol of keepsake fashion.68 Only a few astute consumers of vintage styles had the critical wherewithal to acknowledge the meaning and value of modern dress-up fashion as a cultural force for improving the self and the larger society. We would be remiss not to cheer the intelligence and sensitivity of the Black Lives Matters (BLM) marchers, discussed at the start of this chapter, who took special care to spruce up for the rebellion. Their fancy outfits were more than just vintage nostalgia. The activists’ display of fancy attire honoured the cultural power of the middle-class dress codes that, onceupon-a-time, had been mandated and widely accepted within the culture of respectability.

select bibliography Blaszczyk, Regina Lee, American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009). Blaszczyk, Regina Lee, Fashionability: Abraham Moon and the Creation of British Cloth for the Global Market (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

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On the transition from keepsake to throwaway consumer culture, see Blaszczyk, American Consumer Society.

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producing and predicting fashion Blaszczyk, Regina Lee (ed)., Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Blaszczyk, Regina Lee, ‘Styling Synthetics: DuPont’s Marking of Fabrics and Fashions in Postwar America’, Business History Review, 80 (2006), 485–528. Blaszczyk, Regina Lee, The Color Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). Blaszczyk, Regina Lee, The Synthetics Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024). Blaszczyk, Regina Lee and Véronique Pouillard (eds.), European Fashion: The Creation of a Global Industry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). Blaszczyk, Regina Lee and Ben Wubs (eds.), The Fashion Forecasters: A Hidden History of Color and Trend Prediction (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Dillon, Phyllis, A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry (New York: Yeshiva University Museum, 2005). Goldstein, Gabriel M. and Elizabeth E. Greenberg (eds.), A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry, 1860–1960 (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2012). Honeyman, Katrina, Well Suited: A History of the Leeds Clothing Industry, 1850–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Kidwell, Claudia Brush and Margaret C. Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974). Lister, Jenney (ed.), Mary Quant (London: V&A Publishing, 2019). Sigsworth, E. M., Montague Burton: The Tailor of Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). Worth, Rachel, Fashion for the People: A History of Clothing at Marks & Spencer (Oxford: Berg, 2007).

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THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF HAUTE COUTURE, 1858 TO NOW claire wilcox

‘I mean to take her to Paris. I mean to get her clothing.’ Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

introduction The phenomenon of Parisian haute couture fascinated, inspired, and on occasion troubled nineteenth-century observers, who witnessed its evolution from a specialist form of dressmaking specific to that city into an international business sensation.1 Couture’s rise was unstoppable following the astounding success of its originator, Englishman Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895), and that of the grand couturiers – both men and women – who followed in his footsteps, drawn to the ‘capital’ of fashion with its network of skilled artisans and material luxury. The House of Worth, like many that followed, was named after its founder and had its own distinctive sensibility, although all operated under a similar business model whereby unique seasonal designs would be created by the head of the house, or auteur, and made to order for clients by in-house With gratitude to Dr Kate Bethune for her invaluable help and advice, without which this chapter could not have been written. 1 The term ‘haute couture’ was first used in 1908 and legally registered in 1945. For simplicity ‘couture’ will be used throughout this chapter. Charles Dickens expressed distaste for Worth, the ‘man-milliner’ in his 1863 article ‘Dress in Paris’ published in All the Year Round. See Abigail Joseph, ‘“A Wizard of Silks and Tulle”: Charles Worth and the Queer Origins of Couture’, Victorian Studies, 56/2 (2014), 251–79.

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ateliers. By the late nineteenth century, couture houses had begun to expand their reach, opening proto-boutiques in French resorts such as Deauville, Biarritz, and Cannes. Many went further afield; the pioneering couturière Jeanne Paquin (1869–1936), for example, gained international renown with branches in London in 1896, Buenos Aires in 1912, New York (for furs) in the same year, and Madrid in 1914.2 The creation of bona fide outlets complete with in-house ateliers perpetuated couture’s aesthetic abroad and maintained the high levels of craftsmanship expected of this industry. However, France remained the home of couture, with a ‘Made in Paris’ label an evocative signifier of the city of style. The quality of French textile design was, like the couture industry with which it became embedded, a matter of national pride. Centred in Lyon, where deluxe silks had been designed and handwoven for generations, the Grande Fabrique (silk industry) was characterized by its inventiveness and high quality, with a reputation, as Lesley Ellis Miller explains, that ‘had grown as the result of the state sponsorship of luxury trades since the late seventeenth century, and the formal establishment of haute couture from 1868’.3 Where Napoléon III (1808–73) had encouraged the imperial court to patronize Lyonnaise silks and velvets, so Worth followed suit, ordering vast quantities of plain silk which was fashionable in the 1860s and, as his taste became more ornate, buying up old stock in line with his historicist tendencies as well as commissioning elaborate designs, with some woven to shape. So dense were some of the custom weaves that the designer often left the selvedge exposed; too stiff to be turned, he incorporated it into the garment’s decorative composition.4 This did not go unnoticed by the novelist Émile Zola (1840–1902), for whom no observational detail was too small not to borrow: ‘People won’t talk about anything else, the blue and silver selvage [sic] will be 2

3

4

The House of Worth was taken over by Paquin in 1954 but continued to operate under the name of Worth. Both firms closed their doors for the last time on 1 July 1956. Lesley Ellis Miller, ‘Perfect Harmony: Textile Manufacturers and Haute Couture 1947–57’, in Claire Wilcox (ed.), The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London, 1947–57 (London: V&A Publishing, 2007), 118. Jan G. Reeder, High Style: Masterworks from the Brooklyn Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), 40.

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known from one end of France to the other’,5 he wrote of the ‘ParisParadise’ silk faille, woven specially for his fictional department store The Ladies’ Paradise. A parable of commodity culture and desire, the novel is infused with the erotic charge of fabric and the transformative power of fashion. ‘What I want to do’, Zola stated, ‘is write the poem of modern activity.’6 Inspired by the commercial and creative success of couture, department stores in major cities began to make up Parisian designs to measure for their local clientele, whether in New York, Toronto, or Argentina, using couture approved textiles shipped from France: ‘As a wider clientele became able to acquire fashionable dress, the industry adapted – and by the midnineteenth century was very aware that the department stores were one of their key markets.’7 The availability of ready-to-wear versions of couture styles made being à la mode an increasingly achievable aim for the middle classes, setting in motion a system of supply and demand that was renewed each season by the latest news from Paris. The New York Times (founded in 1851), for example, regularly covered French fashion, well before the formalizing of bi-annual collections became part of couture’s economic and aesthetic structure.8 Aware that some French fashion was too adventurous for American markets, couture houses also began to create ‘Fords’, after the mass-produced Ford Model T automobile – a term first applied by American Vogue in October 1926 to Gabrielle Chanel’s (1883–1971) revolutionary ‘little black dress’ (the comparison was not liked by Chanel) – that were easily adaptable for replication via paper pattern and fabric toile. As Victoria 5

6 7

8

Émile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames/The Ladies’ Paradise (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1883; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 40. Cited in Brian Nelson, introduction to Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, ix. Lesley Ellis Miller, email correspondence 20 June 2021. See also Caroline R. Milbank, New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style (New York: Abrams, 1989); Alexandra Palmer (ed.), Fashion: A Canadian Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); J. P. Daughton, ‘When Argentina Was “French”: Rethinking Cultural Politics and European Imperialism in Belle-Époque Buenos Aires’, Journal of Modern History, 80/4 (2008), 831–64. Each couture house was required to show 100 high-quality designs in order to conform to the requirements of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, established in 1911.

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and Albert Museum curator James Laver explained, a ‘designer’ toile was ‘supplied with full directions for making it up, and although the original dress may have cost a hundred thousand francs, it was now possible to sell a simplified version for as little as fifty dollars’.9 The complexity and multi-layered nature of couture demanded quantities of high-quality and specialist fabrics, much of it created especially for, and in collaboration with, the couture industry – exquisite, handwoven silks from Lyon, embroidered cottons and lace from Switzerland, and later Italy, quality woollens from the mills of Britain, and other materials from further afield, including India – while surface trimmings from fabric flowers to feather work, and buttons to embroidery were supplied by the flotilla of specialist workshops that populated Paris, many with their roots in the eighteenth-century luxury trade.10 Finally, the composition would be ‘signed’ with an identifying cloth label stitched on as the very last act in a gown’s creation. In Worth’s case, this constituted a facsimile of his own autograph ‘C. Worth’, ‘thereby introducing the hand of the master, albeit in woven form’ (Figure 37.1).11 So potent was this sartorial signifier – ‘My signature to their gown 9

10

11

James Laver, A Concise History of Costume (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), 246. Elizabeth Anne Coleman in The Opulent Era: Fashions of Worth, Doucet and Pingat (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), 42, suggests toiles of Worth gowns could be bought in the late nineteenth century. With thanks to Lesley Ellis Miller, who notes that the number of handlooms was at its height in 1860–70 with more than 100,000 in operation. Variety became key: ‘Already by 1874, the brocaded fabrics were a very small proportion of what was being made and the increase in the range of mixed fabrics was the major development; crepe and gauze production commanded a much greater share than previously.’ Email correspondence 20 June 2021. Lesley E. Miller, ‘Paris-Lyon-Paris: Dialogue in the Design and Distribution of Patterned Silks in the Eighteenth Century’, in Robert Fox and Anthony Turner (eds.), Luxury Trades and Consumerism in Ancien Régime Paris: Studies in the History of the Skilled Workforce (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 1998), 139–67. Diana de Marly, Worth: Father of Haute Couture (London: Elm Tree Books, 1980), 135. With thanks to Edwina Ehrman who notes that Worth may have drawn on an existing practice in mainstream fashion: ‘with a few exceptions, labels for garments and accessories started with items which were produced in quantity, especially in fields where there were competing manufacturers, first as printed paper labels, for example for shoes and hats, and then as fabric labels, which were certainly attached to some men’s tailored outerwear by the late 1840s’. Email correspondence 17 May 2021.

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Figure 37.1 Charles Frederick Worth, detail of label in dress made for the imperial Russian court, silk, silver lamé, crystals, sequins, Paris, c. 1888. Sepia Times / Universal Images group via Getty Images.

suffices!’, Worth declared – that by the late twentieth century the word ‘brand’ had become interchangeable with ‘label’ as a form of shorthand for high-status fashion. These labels constitute a roll call for the generations of auteurs that have directed the course of Western fashion and sustained this rarefied discipline’s survival through a century and a half of global change. From the intricacy of its making to its financial weight, creative connections to photography and film and, more recently, its place in queer and black history, couture’s many complexities (and seductive qualities) have been the subject of extensive scholarship, numerous monographs, and a plethora of exhibitions worldwide, while its importance to museum collections and monetary value on the open market continues to rise.12 The creation of high-level 12

Judith Clark and Amy de la Haye with Jeffrey Horsley (eds.), Exhibiting Fashion: Before and after 1971 (London: V&A Publishing, 2014). The book usefully includes what the authors describe as ‘An Incomplete Inventory of Fashion Exhibitions since 1971’, 170–245. Two of the most well-attended exhibitions of recent times were created in collaboration with the fashion

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fashion has many potential narratives, for its story is inevitably interwoven with political and social history, technology and digitization, and, in recent years, the emergence of Chinese and Asian markets. De Marly recounts that during Worth’s early years working as a draper in London ‘his greatest pleasure lay in helping to empty the packing cases of gowns, mantles and hats that would arrive from Paris’.13 This, perhaps, was an experience not dissimilar to that of museum staff receiving a cargo for a fashion exhibition. In keeping with the compelling properties of haute couture and the sublimity of its craft, this chapter will re-address couture in France, England, and North America through the history of the House of Worth, but also through the lens of the curator. Paying close attention to the unique power of the object and the archive, it will consider how his paradigm for couture provided an adaptable model that was as flexible as any of the fabrics that dressed the modern age.

paris and the birth of the auteur My invention is the secret of my success. I don’t want people to invent for themselves; if they did, I should lose half my trade.14

The House of Worth spanned the lavish heights of France’s Second Empire (1852–70) to the late 1950s when couture was in decline, challenged by the rise of the global ready-to-wear industry and a new youth culture emanating from London and also France. Worth’s story – from Lincolnshire-born draper to favoured designer of Empress Eugénie (1826–1920) and from textile connoisseur to marketing genius – built on the late eighteenth-century precedent of Paris as a hotbed of talent which, to its incomparable enrichment, attracted – and continues to attract – designers from all over

13

house itself: Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty was first presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2011 before being staged by the V&A in 2015 where it received 493,043 visitors; Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams was first presented by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 2017 before its 2019 iteration at the V&A where it received 595,000 visitors. De Marly, Worth: Father of Couture, 16. 14 Cited in ibid., 135.

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the world.15 Worth arrived in Paris in 1845, became head salesman at Gagelin-Opigez, Chazelle & Cie, vendor of luxury textiles, mantles, and shawls, and by 1858 had set up, first as Worth et Bobergh Maison Spéciale, Robes et Manteaux, Confectionnés, Soieries, Haute Nouveautés, then independently as Worth, on 7 rue de la Paix, an aristocratic residential street, which became a fashionable shopping district known for its jewellers (Figure 37.2).16 By the 1870s, the designer’s fame was so great that he was satirized by Zola in his 1872 novel La Curée as ‘the illustrious Worms, the couturier of genius to whom the great ladies of the Second Empire bowed down’.17 Worth survived the exile of his greatest client, Empress Eugénie, and the 1871 Commune of Paris (a socialist insurrection following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War), going on to dictate French fashion for the rest of the century.18 By the time of his death in 1895 the house employed 1,200 seamstresses, scores of cutters, tailors, and vendeuses according to De Marly and, under the stewardship of his sons JeanPhilippe and Gaston-Lucien, had a five million franc per annum turnover, producing thousands of garments a year for international royalty, famous actresses and singers, and an international, moneyed clientele that stretched from Europe to Russia and from North America to Japan.19

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17

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19

Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (1988; repr., London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Coleman, Opulent Era; De Marly, Worth: Father of Couture; Amy de la Haye and Valerie Mendes (eds.), The House of Worth: Portrait of an Archive, 1890–1914 (London: V&A Publishing, 2014); Chantal Trubert-Tollu, Françoise Tétart-Vittu, and Jean-Marie MartinHattemberg, The House of Worth, 1858–1954: The Birth of Haute Couture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017). Cartier opened on the rue de la Paix in 1898. Worth’s niece later married into the Cartier family. Émile Zola, La Curée, trans. Brian Nelson (1871; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 90. Eugenie was introduced to Worth by the socialite Pauline de Metternich. See Souvenirs de la Princess Pauline de Metternich (1859–1871), trans. Abigail Joseph (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1922). De Marly, Worth: Father of Couture, 101; Christopher Breward, ‘Worth, Charles Frederick (1825–1895)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/ 29988 (accessed 25 April 2023).

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Figure 37.2 Jean Béraud, Workers Leaving the House of Paquin, rue de la Paix, Paris, c. 1900. Collection of Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Fine Art Images / Heritage Images via Getty Images.

The beguiling backdrop to Worth’s domination of fashion from the mid-nineteenth century was provided by Baron Haussmann’s (1809–1891) transformation of Paris.20 In a process that lasted seventeen years from 1854, the old city was swept away to be replaced with grand boulevards, landscaped gardens, an ornate opera house, and glassed arcades.21 The stage was set for a new operation of style. As couturiers began to take over the private mansions that lined the premier streets of the city, so the ground level became a glamorous threshold to the upper salons of the couture house, offering a sophisticated alternative to the traditional practice of female dressmakers visiting clients in their own homes. One-time residential floors ‘over the shop’ were converted into showrooms, 20

21

See Joan De Jean, How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). The Bois de Boulogne was based on Hyde Park, for Louis Napoléon had lived in exile in London and was taken with the city’s wide roads and green spaces. The opulent Palais Garnier opera house was completed in 1875.

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storerooms, and offices, while the flou (dressmaking) and tailleur (tailoring) workshops where hundreds of seamstresses were employed were sited on the top floor to take advantage of the natural light, as is still the practice today. Worth, swiftly followed by fellow couturiers such as Emile Pingat (1820–1901) – known for luxurious outerwear – and Jacques Doucet (1853–1929) – known for the delicacy of his confections – became part of a fraternity of extravagantly elite establishments, joining Hermès (founded in 1837), Cartier (founded in 1847), and Louis Vuitton (founded in 1854) with whom Worth collaborated when the company moved to the rue de la Paix. Paris, like a jewel box itself, offered everything required for the consumer of style.22 The birth of couture came in a century of scientific discovery – ‘a period of vast transformations and possibilities in terms of a fashion-scape for men and women’ – that inspired innovative textile production, facilitated an expansion in global export markets through new modes of transport, and saw the rise of magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar (founded in New York in 1867), and La Mode Illustrée (1860–1937) which had an extensive readership in America and Europe.23 Like its British equivalent The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–81) it included colour fashion plates of Parisian styles – many by Worth – as well as tissue-paper dress patterns, thus encouraging what Christopher Breward described as ‘an engagement with a luxurious fantasy which bore no obvious connection to the material reality of the

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23

See Chapter 41 by Julia Petrov in this volume. Louis Vuitton’s trunk exhibit was shown in the ‘Leather Palace’ at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. An expensive investment, trunks were an essential means of transporting and protecting expensive new wardrobes and became associated with the peripatetic life of the wealthy. Poiret and other designers’ road shows were known as ‘trunk tours’ because of the quantity of garments that needed to be carried. Oriole Cullen notes that British couturiers often designed gowns around valuable family jewellery. ‘David Sassoon and various others had stories of being asked to design dresses around family jewellery . . . sometimes the designers were sent off to Garrards to see the pieces in storage.’ Email correspondence with Oriole Cullen, 27 July 2021. Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello, ‘Between Luxury and Leisure: The Nineteenth Century’, in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 267.

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majority of readers, beyond responding to their desires and drawing them into a language of consumption’.24 Consumer behaviours were themselves undergoing change. The increased availability of luxury goods coupled with the rise from the early nineteenth century of an affluent and aspirational upper middle class rendered shopping an important leisure pursuit. Moreover, the opening of department stores – such as the Bon Marché (the model for Zola’s 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames: ‘flights of lace, quivering muslin, triumphal wreaths of silk’) and the Magasin du Louvre, both established in Paris by the 1870s – coincided with the expansion of window shopping or faire du lèche-vitrine (‘to lick the shop window’) as a form of performative leisure activity.25 Shopping in public entailed seeing and being seen, and open displays became part of urban life in cities across the world, while mirrored and glassed walkways and arcades allowed strollers to review their reflected selves in motion.

exclusivity, intimacy, and the ‘man-milliner’ While glass shopfronts revealed the merchandise of the department store for all to see, the couture house dissociated itself from retail: more resembling a private residence, with its machinations hidden from the outside world, entering a couture house entailed a unique aesthetic and sartorial experience: at Worth’s there were swagged curtains, rolls of silk spilling over furniture, cushioned divans, screens, hothouse flower arrangements, and objects d’art all of which formed an aesthetic aura where women of wealth and taste mingled, united by their loyalty to the auteur. It was also theatrical; clients journeyed through a series of ever more intimate

24

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The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine was the first English serial to make dress patterns and the latest fashions available to a mass audience. Published by Samuel Beeton, it included contributions from Isabella Beeton, resulting in her Book of Household Management (1861). Paper patterns were popularized in America by James McCall and Ebenezer Butterick from the 1860s. Christopher Breward, ‘Femininity and Consumption: The Problem of the Late Nineteenth-Century Fashion Journal’, Journal of Design History, 7/ 2 (1994), 89. Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, 90, 250.

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antechambers to the final salon which had closed shutters and gas jet lighting, allowing them to view themselves in evening attire: Enormous mirrors rose from floor to ceiling; the softest and most splendid carpets covered the floors; tremendously tall Mercuries in grand liveries and powdered wigs, were sprinkled through the rooms; an exquisite and luxurious budoir [sic] offered the attractions of a standing lunch composed of “every delicacy,” to the fair patronesses of the new house, while waiting their turn to be ushered into the sanctum of the great “artist.”26

So observed The New York Times in 1864, also noting the presence of Madame Worth, who presided over the space ‘with a mixture of haughtiness and blandishment that seems to have done its work on all who entered it’. Here, in a setting that emulated and perhaps surpassed the domestic interiors of Worth’s rich clients, the designer reimagined fashion as a series of seasonal collections for which he determined style, materials, trimmings and accessories and, as has been customary ever since, paraded the forthcoming season’s ideas on mannequins, beginning with his wife, Marie Worth, as the first living model. To its critics, one of couture’s affronts was a shift in power. Where once a seamstress would attend a client at home and make up garments to their instruction and choice of material, now obeisance went in the opposite direction. A potential customer was obliged to visit the couturier’s house, submitting to the authority of the auteur in hitherto prohibited ways. While some male designers, including Worth and, later, the Spanish-born couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895–1972), had occasion to touch their clients during fittings as a consequence of their desire to model directly onto the body, others, such as Jacques Doucet and Christian Dior (1905–1957) – ‘Although I very rarely go into the fitting room, I have all its echoes sedulously reported to me’ – preferred to conduct proceedings during the design stage by pointing at parts of the unfinished garment with a baton.27 The dynamic of a couture house with its focus on the figure, clothed or 26 27

The New York Times, Thursday, 3 March 1864. Christian Dior, Dior by Dior: The Autobiography of Christian Dior, trans. Antonia Fraser (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1957), 65.

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unclothed, was echoed by the intimacy – albeit mediated by cloth – that was necessary between auteur and client to produce fashionable perfection. Granted the liberty of ‘creasing gauze over the bosoms of princesses, placing ribbons and flowers on the bodices of duchesses’, the auteur was also afforded unprecedented proximity to those above him in station.28 Another of the hedonic privileges of being dressed by Worth and subsequent couturiers was that their creations were, through a combination of stylistic nuances and quality of design, recognizable to those in the know (and when Worth was at his most famous and other couturiers fewer, even those not in the know). Given money (and an introduction) was all that was required to enter into the world of couture, many actresses and singers such as Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse, Gabrielle Réjane, and Lillie Langtry (whom Worth dressed for her debut appearance in the comedy She Stoops to Conquer on the London stage in 1881) became favoured clients. Dressing actresses for the stage as well as in their private lives was an effective way of publicizing a house’s designs, for their every appearance was reported by the press. While this provided a rich source of income for couturiers – as did the vogue for costumes for fancy-dress balls and masquerades – it led to disquiet about fashion’s ability to dissemble.29 ‘Reading’ fashion therefore became a means to quantify social status in an era of social ambiguity and what Caroline Evans calls the ‘slippage’ between celebrities, mannequins, and respectable women of fashion.30 It also constituted a flattering form of attention whether in the form of mutual admiration by those of equal privilege or via the gaze of the disadvantaged spectator, thus giving couture a currency that went beyond value; or rather, a ‘valuation’ not factored on mere materials and labour but 28

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Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire, 417, cited in Joseph, ‘“A Wizard of Silks and Tulle”’, 256–7. Private fêtes and extravagant balls remained popular with high society up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Caroline Evans, ‘The Ontology of the Fashion Model’, AA Files, 63, available at www.readingdesign.org/fashion-model (accessed 25 April 2023). See also Caroline Evans, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

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possessing an unquantifiable significance.31 Many complied, but many complained: ‘What an absurdity . . . eighty thousand francs for a few dresses! How is it possible that any woman could wear, in a couple of years, eighty thousand francs’ worth of gowns?’ said Worth’s early champion, the Princess Metternich (1836–1921).32 With his retail roots, Worth was more than aware of profit and loss, but as begetter of a new profession, he had the confidence to seek validation in art establishment terms, and charge comparable prices – given his own self-importance, the historicism of his designs, and the regular appearances of his dresses in society portraits by ‘couturier-painters’ such as Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805–1873), John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Giovanni Boldini (1842–1931), and Jacques Joseph (‘James’) Tissot (1836–1902).33 Like other creative individuals working in a field without academy status, such as photography (the artist-photographer Nadar attempted to challenge this by wearing an artist’s tunic and boldly signing his photographs), Worth – as depicted in Nadar’s photographic portrait – adopted artistic dress, donning a loose gown, beret, and soft cravat for, unlike the couturière, he could not be his own model. Poiret, who would work for the company after Worth’s death, emulated this aspirational stance by extrovert dressing (boldly striped suits, loud waistcoats, and spats) and even more overtly comparing his fashion – Dior likened its ‘bold, curving lines’ to a Boldini picture – to portraiture: ‘Visit the great 31

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Worth’s charges were calculated essentially by doubling the costs of materials and trebling the cost of labour. Trubert-Tollu et al., The House of Worth, 157. Princess Metternich, who ‘made’ Worth by introducing him to the Empress Eugénie, quoted in The New York Times, Thursday, 3 March 1864. ‘Where is the modern life in all these paintings which a couturier like Charles Worth could have painted, if he’d had the temperament of a painter?’ Joris-Karl Husymans, Modern Art, trans. Brendan King (Cambridge: Dedalus, 1883), 55. Paul Poiret noted that ‘all the trends of fashion were revealed’ at private view days of painting exhibitions. Paul Poiret, King of Fashion: The Autobiography of Paul Poiret, trans. Stephen Haden Guest (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931; repr. London: V&A Publishing, 2009), 15. Other sites of display included the racetrack, the Bois de Boulogne and the Champs-Élysées where couturiers often sent mannequins to mingle amidst the crowds, dressed in the latest – and often provocative – fashions, causing a tension notably captured by photographers such as the Seeberger Brothers and Jacques-Henri Lartigue.

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dressmakers, and you will not feel that you are in a shop, but in the studio of an artist, who intends to make of your dresses a portrait and a likeness of yourself.’34 In a natural extension to this vindication of couture’s artistry (and a move to distinguish bespoke from ready-to-wear), some couturiers including Poiret, the London designer Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon, 1863–1935), and later Christian Dior insisted on the uniqueness of each gown by titling them, so imparting an added level of mystery and intrigue. Imaginative titles also implied a wider narrative – a tendency perhaps originally inspired by the craze for theatrical tableaux and fancy-dress balls in the nineteenth century, all of which provided custom for couturiers. The trend was taken further when the Italian-born couturière Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973) – as much artist as designer – named her thematic, Surrealist-inspired collections: Stop Look and Listen (1935), Music and Paris (1937), Zodiac, Pagan, and Circus (1938), and Commedia dell’arte (1939), so creating a precedent which saw fruition in the descriptively titled collections of theatrical, narrative-driven designers of the late twentieth century such as John Galliano (b. 1960) and Alexander McQueen (1969–2010).

value and diversification The complex status of the couturier was dependent on their detachment from trade. Couture garments were not priced until completed and therefore, unlike ready-to-wear, could not be discounted (in Vogue fashion shoots they are still ‘POA’). However, diversification was necessary for a house to survive, whether through beauty products, accessories, or replication of design ideas. For once, the House of Worth was behind the game with perfume, with its first fragrance Dans la Nuit and bestseller Je Reviens not introduced until 1924 and 1932, respectively. While Poiret’s foundational Perfumes de Rosine launched in 1911 – complete with hand-painted bottles and poetic captions by Paul Verlaine – did not save the house from closure following its 34

Dior, Dior by Dior, 16; Paul Poiret, My First Fifty Years, trans. Stephen Haden Guest (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931; repr. London: V&A Publishing, 2019), 178.

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auteur’s bankruptcy, Chanel No. 5, launched in 1921 with its blend of synthetic and natural elements, pharmaceutical bottle, and monochrome simplicity, spoke, like Chanel’s designs themselves, to a new modernist aesthetic that re-proposed luxury as the absence of ostentation. Chanel’s perfume-making operation provided an income for the designer throughout her lifetime and has augmented the company’s couture collections ever since. Similarly, the success of Lanvin’s perfumes, in particular Arpège created in 1924 with its black and gold glass bottle and image of Jeanne Lanvin with her daughter (designed by Paul Iribe), supported the company during leaner years, ensuring that France’s longest standing fashion house still survives today in its original location on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.35 Perfume sales flourished in the 1930s, filling the pages of fashion magazines such as Vogue with promise, so it was not surprising that, ever shrewd, Christian Dior launched Miss Dior almost in the same breath as his first ‘New Look’ collection in 1947. Funded by Marcel Boussac, the ‘cotton king’ of France, Dior’s empire was built on the nexus of fabric, fashion, and fragrance, inextricably linking the marketing of couture as an immersive discipline, appealing to all the senses.36 As an easily exportable and transportable commodity, fragrance had worldwide impact and, with seductive advertising campaigns (houses were loath to advertise couture itself), appealed both to those who could not afford couture clothing and those who could. Unlike fashion, perfume – despite its ineffable quality – offered constancy and inspired loyalty, resulting in repeat purchases triggered by a sense of personal identification and ‘ownership’ of what was in fact a mass-produced, if reassuringly expensive, commodity. While new perfumes have proliferated, the appeal of fragrances invented, in some cases, nearly a century ago remains.37 Fragrance and beauty products have also ensured the survival of less substantial couture houses as the communities of wealthy 35

36 37

In 2018 Chanel published their annual turnover, of $10 billion, for the first time since the company’s foundation in 1910. In 2020 it revealed the impact of the global pandemic. ‘Chanel Forecasts “Difficult” Two Years for Luxury amid Covid-19’, Financial Times (ft.com), 18 June 2020. Dior, Dior by Dior, 18–20. A personal note here: my working-class grandmother always wore Chanel No. 5.

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women that Worth and his peers dressed gradually diminished. Today, although the couture collections are as spectacular as ever, the number of committed couture clients number hundreds rather than the thousands of the past, so rendering the sale of the ‘name’ in other, more reliable iterations, essential.

global promotion and transatlantic trade As the time-consuming changes of dress demanded of women throughout the day lessened in the late nineteenth century, so new leisure pursuits and opportunities for employment increased, reflected in practical, ankle-length walking suits which played to London’s tailoring strengths, offering real competition to Parisian houses (they were a particular speciality of the London- and Paris-based firms of Redfern and Creed). The costume trotteur – ‘Sometimes Princesses take the omnibus, and go on foot in the streets’ – promised freedom, and found its mechanical equivalent in le trottoir roulant (moving walkway), one of the novelties of the 1900 Paris Exposition.38 The walkway ran in a 3.5 km circle, and had two articulated wooden platforms, one moving at 8 km per hour, the other at half speed, while the new Paris Metro rumbled below as it connected key points in the city just as the exposition, in common with other world fairs, connected, fetishized, and kaleidoscoped world cultures. Nearby, at the Palais du Costume in a final gathering of fin de siècle fashion, P. Barroin, Boué Soeurs, Callot Soeurs, Doucet, Félix, Paquin, Raudnitz et Cie, Redfern, Rouff, Worth, and others curated a spectacular display which included over fifty lifelike wax mannequins set in domestic tableaux and lit with electric lights. As well as admiring the latest fashions, visitors could see recreations of historical styles, thus rooting the production of couture in history. An expensively produced souvenir folio of hand-painted prints of the outfits could even be purchased, Les Toilettes de la Collectivité de la Couture, Les Chefs d’Oeuvre à l’Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900, thus foreshadowing the enduring popularity of the fashion exhibition and 38

Gaston Worth cited in Poiret, My First Fifty Years, 38; Anna Jackson, EXPO International Expositions, 1851–2010 (London: V&A Publishing, 2008), 25.

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attendant catalogue.39 As ever, the couturier’s creations were valuable currency. In October 1900, the New York dressmaker’s magazine The Pictorial Review contained ‘exact reproductions, from photographs on the spot, of 48 costumes by the leading dressmakers of Paris’ from the exhibition. A pattern was available for each for just one dollar.40 How was couture to survive in an era of mass production and social change? One of the contributing factors to its success had been the increase in transatlantic trade, brought about by the development of luxury ocean liners that could cross the Atlantic in a matter of days rather than weeks. Opportunistically, couturiers staged fashion shows to a captive audience and paid mannequins to mingle among the passengers who could place orders that would be telegraphed ahead and delivered on arrival. Worth also cannily placed promotional brochures in the first-class cabins printed in English, French, and Spanish (a practice that was to continue with the birth of air travel) as well as employing British saleswomen in his house to service the American, British, and Russian communities that over-wintered in France. Mail order was also an option, as Worth’s son Jean-Philippe (1856–1926) explained: ‘People write to us from all over America. We often send photographs of some of our newest creations to all parts of the world.’41 With the great fortunes that had been made by the

39

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41

Exhibitions of historical fashions had previously taken place in Paris, staged in museums and galleries by costume collectors. Artists such as Talbot Hughes collected clothing to dress the models for his genre scenes. Theatres built large collections of historical dress which was often altered to fit modern body shapes. The collection of the V&A has numerous examples of altered garments, often identifiable by a theatrical stamp, paper label, or number printed onto the lining. Christina Johnson, ‘“The Art of Dressing Has Never Been Manifested with So Much Brilliancy”: Fashion and the Paris Exposition of 1900’, FIDM Museum, https://fidmmuseum.org/2011/02/the-art-of-dressing-has-never-been-mani fested-with-so-much-brilliancy-fashion-and-the-paris-expositi.html (accessed 25 April 2023). Poiret recalled leafing ‘through the albums which told of the exuberances of good Father Worth the couturier of the Tuileries. They were full of samples and water-colour sketches’ when he worked for Worth in the late 1890s. Poiret, The King of Fashion, 38–9. See also de la Haye and Mendes (eds.), The House of Worth. The Worth-Paquin archive held in the collection of the V&A includes 187 files of house records, fashion plates, engravings,

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building of new railway networks, leading to urban expansion and industry, cultural grand tours around Europe became part of the sentimental education of American heiresses, with many – such as Jennie Jerome Churchill – marrying into European aristocracy. In his 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady, the story of ‘a certain young woman affronting her destiny’, Henry James recounts the psychological and social impact of the meeting of the new monied, commercial classes of America and the old aristocratic, titled families of Europe, and the particular influence Paris had on cultural energies.42 Here, his protagonist Isabel Archer is told ‘Why Paris leads everywhere. You can’t go anywhere unless you come here first. Everyone that comes to Europe has got to pass through.’43 Many ‘dollar Princesses’ did pass through, commissioning entire wardrobes – ‘I mean to take her to Paris. I mean to get her clothing’ – and often their wedding dresses too.44 The collection of the V&A holds one such, a pearl-encrusted and lace-embellished gown made by Worth for a daughter of Isaac Merritt Singer, the American sewing machine magnate, for her London marriage in the early 1880s (Figure 37.3).45 Worth remarked rather candidly: ‘I like to dress them, for, as I say occasionally, “they have faith, figures and francs” – faith to believe in me, figures that I can put into shape, francs to pay my bills. Yes, I like to dress Americans.’46 The American markets were not all about wealth, for its supremacy in mass-manufacture constituted a tangible threat to the profitable offshoots of couture that were entangled with its artistic production from the outset. Despite Worth’s deflation of the crinoline in the 1870s in favour of the bustle and train – achieved by the

42 43 44

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drawings, and photographs, along with documents relating to court dress regulations, dating from 1825 to 1952. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (London: Penguin [1881 ed.], 1973), x–xi. Ibid., 214–15. Ibid., 41. The romance of American money passed into popular culture with the musical play The Dollar Princess (London and New York, 1909). Lily Elsie played the part of Alice Conder on the London stage with dresses by Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon). V&A Museum number: T.63/4&A-1976. See also Edwina Ehrman, The Wedding Dress: 300 Years of Bridal Fashions (London: V&A Publishing, 2011). De Marly, Worth: Father of Couture, 135. Worth noted the extravagance of Russian and Chilean clients but observed that French, English, and German women had more restraint.

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Figure 37.3 Charles Frederick Worth, Wedding Dress, embroidered satin and velvet, Paris and London, 1879–80. Victoria & Albert Museum: Given by Mrs G. T. Morton T.62 to B-1976. Jacques Boyer / Roger Viollet via Getty Images.

use of internal ties which gathered the skirts to form an accumulation of drapery at the rear – and introduction of the svelte, tailored princess line (after Alexandra, Princess of Wales 1844–1925) in the 1870s, the slow pace of change of silhouette in the nineteenth century had benefited couturiers embarking on ready-to-wear, for variables could be achieved through surface modifications rather than dramatic structural shifts, offering a tiered price structure based on the number of trimmings and quality of fabric. As Worth explained in an 1871 interview, a client with aspirations to be à la mode could just as easily spend £400 as £4,000 a year, for he developed a means of producing quantities of garments using

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standardized parts such as sleeves, bodices, and skirts. These could be translated into toiles or paper patterns and quickly assembled using a sewing machine, with customized beadwork, bows, and suchlike added by hand, thus still giving the impression that it was a ‘Worth’, for an outfit’s quintessential value lay in being a creation identifiably from his house.47 However, as Nancy Troy observed, one consequence was that ‘success in defining and circulating a distinctive style, whether in art or in clothing, assured its vulnerability to copying and pastiche’.48 One of Parisian couture’s unique characteristics is that it has long been a regulated collective, established in the full knowledge that strength to fight ‘knock-offs’ lay in numbers and in legislation. One of Worth’s most significant contributions was his involvement in the foundation of couture’s trade union in 1868. First known as the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, des Confectionneurs et des Tailleurs pour Dame, in 1911 it became the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, thus distinguishing the most elite houses from other dressmaking and tailoring trades. The Chambre was also committed to investment in couture’s thousands of workers. Established in 1929, the Paris dressmaking schools, Les Écoles de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, were created to train a skilled workforce of petites-mains (seamstresses) for France’s vast fashion industry which, by the late 1930s, had an export value of approximately 2,000 million francs.49 After the shock of the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War, and the potential demise of couture, the term ‘haute couture’ was trade-marked and the association renamed the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture as it still remains today.50 47 48

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Ibid., 100. See also Chapter 35 by Véronique Pouillard in this volume. Nancy Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 7. Alexandra Palmer, Couture and Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002), 19. Worth’s descendants continued to serve on various official French fashion bodies up to the 1950s when the house closed. For an excellent analysis of the creative, financial, and emotional cost of the occupation, see Lou Taylor and Marie McLoughlin (eds.), Paris Fashion and World War Two: Global Diffusion and Nazi Control (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

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imagery and imitation With the twentieth century came an increased connectivity. Japonisme had already had a profound influence on dress culture in Europe and North America, introducing asymmetry, a tendency unfamiliar in fashion before then, and influencing both textile design and form, as obi-like sashes, wrapover bodices, and kimono sleeves became part of the couturier’s lexicon, a new fluidity foundational on the swells of the body rather than the intractability of the corset. The focus on the rear of the dress that the bustle and train of the 1870s invited had encouraged the frequent depiction by painters of women of fashion coquettishly glancing backwards, a pose first seen in the Japanese prints that had begun to circulate in Paris. In Tissot’s painting The Ball (1878) the same sinuous pose suggests the drama of arrival. However, amidst the crush of a social event, it is the yellow cascades of fabric of the subject’s bustle and train that take centre stage, its textile restlessness emphasized by the pattern of Japanese carp that circle the skirt’s hem (Figure 37.4).51 Writing of Worth’s ‘painterly approach to pattern design (ebamoyo in Japanese)’, Akiko Fukai describes how ‘the entire surface of the garment is treated as a single design field of canvas, a mode of decoration common in Japanese kimono’.52 This approach was made manifest in a ball gown of 1898, now in the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection, by Jean-Philippe Worth made from sky blue silk satin patterned with rhinestone glittered butterflies. The fabric was woven specifically for the ensemble for, as they ascend, they become smaller as if flying away, thus giving the impression of fluttering movement which would have been enhanced as the wearer walked. Fashion’s enduring recourse to nature as design inspiration found a particular synergy with Japonisme’s emphasis on the symbolic and seasonal beauty of the natural world:

51 52

In the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Akiko Fukai, ‘Japonism in Fashion’, in Japonism in Fashion: Tokyo (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Kurieishon Fesutibaru Jikko¯ Iinkai, 1996), 6, www.kci.or.jp/en/resea rch/dresstudy/pdf/e_Fukai_Japonism_in_Fashion.pdf (accessed 10 July 2021).

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Figure 37.4 James Tissot, The Ball, oil on canvas, 1878. 90 cm × 50 cm. Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Art Media / Print Collector / via Getty Images.

Beginning in 1890, Lyon textiles emphasized typically Japanese motifs, such as chrysanthemums, flowing water, flowers and birds, swallows and waves, and various grasses. These represented a clear shift in point of view, in style and subject matter, from previous Lyon silks. Chrysanthemums, a frequently featured theme, came to be favored by Westerners in part through Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème or as a symbol of Japan’s imperial family, whose images appeared in French fashion magazines. Thereafter, and until the 1920s, the blossoms appeared over and over in fashion as an emblem of Japan.53

53

Ibid.

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Chrysanthemums indeed feature in another evening dress (also in the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection) which because of its historicism is perhaps one of Charles Frederick Worth’s last creations. While its red velvet sleeves have Tudor overtones, the fabric is startlingly contemporary in its decorative abstraction. Showered with gold chrysanthemum petals falling on an iridescent blue satin ground, the composition seems to allude to life’s (and fashion’s) transience, a recurring theme in Japanese literature which, like its arts, also became popularized in Europe in the nineteenth century as translations of classical poems became increasingly available (Figure 37.5). Poèmes de la Libellule (Poems of the Dragonfly), an anthology of Japanese classical poems, published in 1885 by the French poet and Chinese and Japanese scholar Judith Gautier (1845–1917), had particular impact because of the beauty of its design, with each poem over-printed onto illustrations by the Paris-based artist Yamamoto Hôsui.54 How impatiently I planted and longed to see: You chrysanthemum Did I ever imagine We would meet in fading autumn

fin de sie` cle All fashion must eventually also fade. In À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913) Marcel Proust’s character the painter Elstir, in answer to Albertine’s ‘Tell me, do you think women’s fashions for motoring pretty?’ replies ‘No, but that will come in time. You see, there are very few good couturiers at present, one or two only, Callot [Soeurs] – although they go in rather too freely for lace – Doucet,

54

Reeder, High Style, 42–4. Museum numbers: 2009.300.622a–c; 2009.300.1324a, b. Gautier translated 88 poems for Poèmes de la Libellule sourced from early anthologies of Japanese poems compiled between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, including Kokin Wakashu¯ [Collection of Japanese Poems of Ancient and Modern Times]. I am grateful to Masami Yamada for introducing me to this ¯ e no Chisato (active 883–903). See also poetry and for translating this poem by O www.jef.or.jp/journal/pdf/gallery0309.pdf (accessed 12 July 2021).

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Figure 37.5 House of Worth, Evening Dress, silk, velvet, lace and metallic passementerie, Paris, 1893. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Edith Gardiner, 1926 2009.300.622ac. Heritage Art / Heritage Images group via Getty Images.

Chéruit, Paquin sometimes. The others are all ghastly.’55 The family firm of Doucet, based near Worth on the rue de la Paix, had specialized in fine lace and lingerie but from the 1860s became a significant player in couture under Jacques Doucet. While Worth’s designs sublimated the body with their bold textile juxtapositions and formal structure, Doucet’s flowing robes and sinuous tea gowns evoked the intimacy of the house’s origins. In this, they offered a seductive mélange of textures that anticipated the semideshabillé aesthetic of London couturier Lucile, as fashion began to 55

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 2: Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, D. J. Enright, and Terence Kilmartin (1913; repr. London: Vintage Classics, 1996), 555.

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shed its many layers. Established in 1893, Lucile followed her compatriots Redfern and Kate Reily in achieving international success, founding her London house in 1895 and opening branches in New York in 1910, Paris in 1911, and Chicago in 1915.56 In opposition to the brightness of Poiret’s artist’s palette, Lucile offered washes of colour like a watercolour, achieved by the layering of translucent fabrics over a neutral foundation and the creation of ‘underclothes as delicate as cobwebs and as beautifully tinted as flowers’.57 Like Worth, Lucile also showed her ‘gowns of emotion’ (each christened with a risqué title) on live mannequins and took this further. Having already designed costumes for the theatre she wrote: ‘Slowly the idea of a mannequin parade, which would be entertaining to watch as a play, took shape in my mind. I would have glorious, goddess-like girls who would walk to and fro dressed in my models, displaying them to the best advantage to an admiring audience of women.’ It was not surprising that successful London designers should seek approbation in Paris. Ever since Worth’s patron the Empress Eugénie suggested the London firm of Creed (established in the 1840s) relocate to Paris where it became known for its impeccable tailoring and perfumery, connections between Paris and London remained strong. This was partly because of proximity; international clients could travel between the two cities with ease, placing orders which would be shipped across the world oceans following their sartorial grand tours. British-born Edward Molyneux (1891–1974), Lucile’s protégé, however, launched his house in Paris on the rue Royale in 1919 first, before opening a branch in London in 1933, where the discreet ambience and pearlgrey décor of his French-infused salon contributed to his mystique and success. Although many London showrooms made a living by selling copies of French designs – as a large collection of drawings 56

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London designer Kate Reily had established an international business by 1894 preceded by Redfern in the 1880s. See Jenny Lister, ‘Heather Firbank and London’s Couture Industry’, in Cassie Davies-Strodder, Jenny Lister, and Lou Taylor (eds.), London Society Fashion: 1905–1925 (London: V&A Publishing, 2015), 114–15. Cited in Amy de la Haye, ‘Court Dressmaking in Mayfair from the 1890s to the 1920s’, in Amy de la Haye and Edwina Ehrman (eds.), London Couture 1923–1975: British Luxury (London: V&A Publishing, 2015), 17.

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in the collection of the V&A by London firm Handley-Seymour from the 1920s and 1930s shows – it was mainly after the Second World War with the establishment in 1942 of INCSOC (the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers) and Norman Hartnell’s profile as royal dressmaker that London began to venture beyond tailored costumes and debutantes’ gowns.58 The number of London houses was small but of high quality, and many British clients remained loyal despite the temptation of the Parisian houses that opened branches in London, expanding their clientele to British high society. Moreover they also captured passing international trade, for many ocean liners docked at Liverpool where wealthy passengers would travel to London before embarking on their tour of Europe. Despite London’s best attempts, Paris had far more couture houses and the edge for inventiveness, alongside the inherent and historical support structures needed to adapt to change while still delivering couture at the highest level.59 Britain, despite its proficiency in tailoring and an innovative textile industry (The West Cumberland Silk Mills, for example, was created to manufacture high-quality silks and rayons for the fashion trade in 1938, including Parisian couturiers such as Christian Dior) did not threaten couture until the 1960s.60

performativity Nor did international art movements have the same impact on London’s couturiers, embedded as most of them were in the sartorial traditions and codes of the British social season. The abrupt and colourful shift in fashion brought about by Paul Poiret in the 1910s, 58

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Elizabeth Handley-Seymour was a court dressmaker best known for designing the Duchess of York’s wedding gown and coronation gown when she became Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Like many high-end London designers she also sold reproductions of Paris fashions, including Poiret, Molyneux, and Chanel for which she would have paid a fee. There are 4,863 sketches in the collection of the V&A in 48 bound volumes. Twelve in London as opposed to forty-seven in Paris in 1943, a significant drop from the seventy operational in Paris just before the Second World War. Claire Wilcox, ‘Introduction’, in Wilcox (ed.), The Golden Age of Couture, 14–16. Christopher Breward and Claire Wilcox (eds.), The Ambassador Magazine: Promoting Post-War British Fashion (London: V&A Publishing, 2012).

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however, owed a debt to successive waves of Japonisme and a general fervour for oriental motifs, infused with the dynamism of the Ballet Russes which revolutionized early twentieth-century art and culture. A wider sense of the interrelationship between fashion, performance, and the avant-garde became manifest in his couture house which opened in 1903 and was realized in his limited edition art albums Les Robes de Paul Poiret racontées par Paul Iribe (1908) – Iribe also designed Poiret’s label – and Les Choses de Paul Poiret vues par Georges Lepape (1911), for the pochoir with its bright, flat colours and linearity captured the essence of Poiret’s designs in a way that black-and-white photography could not.61 Poiret’s domestic and artistic life coalesced, reflecting his vision of an integrated lifestyle encompassing fragrance, toiletries, cosmetics, and daring interior decoration. He named his perfume company Les Parfums de Rosine (est. 1911) after his eldest daughter and Les Ateliers de Martine, which produced textiles and decorative arts, launched following a visit to Vienna in 1910 where he bought Wiener Werkstätte textiles for dresses, after his youngest. Never publicity shy, he published unusually intimate lifestyle photographs of himself and his wife Denise ‘at home’ amidst his modern art collection – which included works by Brancusi and Man Ray – and even in bed, antedating today’s celebrity culture.62 Poiret’s designs ranged from the sublimely intuitive – simple, high-waisted chemise dresses, for which Denise, as unlaced and unpetticoated muse, provided the perfect foil – to others such as the lampshade-shaped ‘Sorbet’ worn with harem trousers which blurred the line between fashion and costume and was inspired by the couple’s infamous fancy-dress parties and promoted in Poiret’s designs for Jacques Richepin’s play Le Minaret, which premiered in Paris in 1913 (Figure 37.6). One of the first designers to take his caravanserai abroad, Poiret’s promotional trips to Europe and America 61

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Poiret also used Raoul Dufy’s textile designs for ‘La Perse’ coat, ‘La Rose d’Iribe’ dress, and the ‘Bois de Boulogne’ dress. This recalls a scene described by Valérie Feuillet in Quelques Années de ma Vie (1894), cited in Joseph, ‘“A Wizard of Silks and Tulle”’, 263–6, of being received by Worth in the marital bedroom for an urgent consultation about a dress while his wife Marie, in a lace and ribbon nightgown, was still abed.

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Figure 37.6 Paul Poiret, theatre costume for Jacques Richepin’s The Minaret, Paris, 1913. Roger Viollet via Getty Images.

accompanied by nine house models (in matching outfits) bestowed on him the title ‘The King of Fashion’ setting a precedent for couturiers to embark on international travel rather than expect the world to come to Paris.63 Poiret’s confidence – ‘A few refused to dress to my taste, and retired; others, better advised, accepted the dress I imposed on them’ – also emboldened others, for he cut the sartorial ties between the fin de siècle world of Doucet and 63

Poiret’s mannequin tour of Europe included Frankfurt, Berlin, Potsdam, Warsaw, Moscow, St Petersburg, Petrograd, Budapest, Vienna, and Munich. His American tour took place in 1913. Poiret, The King of Fashion, 71–6 and 152. Jeanne Paquin embarked on an ambitious tour to America the year after, complete with mannequins, stage set, and stage and lighting hands. See Evans, The Mechanical Smile, 70.

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Worth, with whom he had gained his wings, in favour of a dynamic dialogue between fashion and the avant-garde.64 This was furthered in the interchange between Surrealism and fashion in the 1930s in the form of the ebullient, oft-photographed and surprisingly commercially successful work of Elsa Schiaparelli, as couture embraced the modern age.65

comme des garc¸ ons Whereas Poiret was audacious – fashion had needed his conviction that it could not dissolve in a pool of chiffon – and used art as a leverage to propel it forward, Gabrielle Chanel (1883–1971) eschewed any such fantasies about its status. Instead, scissors in hand, she concentrated on creating the fundamentals of the modern woman’s wardrobe, adapting the language and palette of menswear, so bringing equality in terms of comfort and freedom of movement one step closer for women. Her dresses were waistless, cardigan jackets pliable, and blouses front opening (unlike the awkward back fastenings of the previous decade that required the help of a ladies’ maid). Her androgynous designs also encouraged a different bearing; a hand unencumbered by accessories could rest on hip or be thrust into a pocket; short skirts led to a greater length of stride; feet that were comfortably shod in golf shoes could be seen insouciantly crossed at the ankle (Figure 37.7). These radical possibilities were performed by Chanel herself; for the first time a designer was her own best model. Her lineage was her own, built around her persona for unlike other couturiers, she never worked for another house – ‘I have been a couturière, by chance. I have made perfumes, by chance’ – preferring to cut her cloth to her own taste and philosophy.66 64

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Poiret, The King of Fashion, 112. Said in reference to guests who refused to change into ‘Persian’ costume at Poiret’s ‘Thousand-and-Second Night’ fête in 1911 but equally applicable to the designer’s dictatorial attitude towards clients. Schiaparelli was one of the first to create a perfume boutique within her premises. It took the form of a giant birdcage and was designed by the fashionable interior decorator Jean-Michel Frank (1895–1941). She also opened a branch in London. Justine Picardie, Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life (London: HarperCollins, 2010; repr. 2017), 283.

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Figure 37.7 Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, modelling one of her suits on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris, 30 May 1929. Collection of the Hulton Archive. Sasha / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

Along with Chanel’s new wardrobe came a flexibility that went beyond the suppleness of the jersey she repurposed from sportswear. Her clothes could be put on quickly, folded flat like the kimono, for they had no boning, and packed in an instant for weekends on the coast. Arms and legs were freed; where once pallor had been an indicator of class, now a tan was de rigueur; hair was short – more convenient for swimming in the sea – and regional accessories became yacht wear – straw hats, espadrilles, and Breton t-shirts, which Chanel, who advocated costume jewellery for evening, teamed with multiple strings of real pearls in a startling inversion of convention. It was not surprising therefore that Chanel was commissioned to create the clothing for Diaghilev’s ballet Le Train Bleu (1924)

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named after the night train that carried wealthy holidaymakers from Calais to the French Riviera where she had opened branches in Deauville in 1913 and Biarritz in 1915, offering a new category of fashion resort wear. Here, casuals and sporting ensembles – bathing outfits, shorts, cap-sleeved tops and cardigans could be bought off the peg; imbued (and labelled) with the designer’s spirit, they bridged the gap between haute couture and ready-to-wear while remaining exclusive through the high prices the fashionable set paid to be à la mode, even when at leisure.

glimmer An alternative vision of couture flourished in the 1930s, endorsed by the burgeoning film industry which, building on fashion newsreels and mannequin films that Poiret and others had developed for publicity purposes, became reliant on its seductive and dramatic possibilities. ‘[E]veryone was a star. There was a strong whiff of celluloid everywhere. Everything was Hollywood. Glamour’, proclaimed Diana Vreeland (1901–1989) editor-in-chief of American Vogue.67 Cinema offered a collective experience to a vast demographic invested in fantasy at a dark time in America following the Great Depression, and a sense of foreboding in Europe as war threatened. Many costume designers trained in Paris before turning to film; American Howard Greer (1896–1974), the first ‘costume-couturier’, worked with Lucile before opening his own house in Los Angeles in 1928, attracting clients such as Greta Garbo, and going on to design Katherine Hepburn’s Surrealist-touched wardrobe in Bringing up Baby (1938) where her rapid shifts from gamine to seductress to tomboy evoked the protean qualities of a fashion show.68 The allure of chiaroscuro influenced the types of material employed by couturiers. Lustrous fabrics such as shimmering silks and satins, cut on the cross to achieve a seductive cling and

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Instead of taking his models to America, Poiret took a colour film of them modelling in his garden. Diana Vreeland, ‘People Are Talking about: Photographers in Vogue: Horst – The Aura of Glamour’, American Vogue, 1 October 1984, 702. See Chapter 26 by Stella Bruzzi in this volume.

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offset by the addition of sparkling diamanté buckles and clips were married with new synthetic materials from fish-scale sequins made from cellulose to gold lamé and ‘glass’ fabric – fragile and transparent and employed by innovative designers such as Schiaparelli – which complemented the luminescence of the ‘movies’. The animation of fabric through movement was nowhere more evident than in the dancing of Fred Astaire – in suits that seemed glued to his body apart from the whiplash of his flying tails – and the liquid properties of satin, ostrich feathers, and tulle in the extravagant evening gowns of his partner, Ginger Rogers.69 In return for this transatlantic exchange, American designers brought new aesthetic considerations to Paris, and a certain hard glamour. Chicago-born Mainbocher (Main Rousseau Bocher, 1890– 1976), one-time fashion editor of French Vogue, was one of the first American designers to gain entrée into the unique world of Parisian couture in the early 1930s, offering a svelte, restrained aesthetic and notably dressing the Duchess of Windsor (Mrs Wallis Simpson), one of the most photographed couture clients of the time. Mindful of the need for instant impact (as is still the case with royal clothing today), geometry and restraint prevailed and were immensely photogenic. Long gone were the complexities of Worth’s festooned compositions which read like a different dress from side, back, and front. Instead, the rationality of modernist fashion invited the viewer to understand the couturier’s concept in one glance and assume it to be consistent from every angle. I offer a simply cut but technically sophisticated sequinned jacket with a pattern of bold blue and white diagonal stripes by Mainbocher in the collection of the V&A as an exemplar. It is similar to, if not the same as, the one worn by the Duchess for a series of portraits taken by Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) in 1937 for Vogue magazine (Figure 37.8). It was also Beaton who acquired the jacket for the museum as part of his accretion of hundreds of 69

Fred Astaire ordered his suits from Anderson & Sheppard on Savile Row. He danced in their showroom in order to ensure the cut allowed him freedom of movement. This was achieved by additional seams that allowed the fabric to stretch. The skill of the tailor meant that when at rest, the suit returned to ‘normality’ thus never resembling costume. One of Astaire’s suits from Shall We Dance (1937) is held in the collection of the V&A. Museum number: S.206:1,2-2015.

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Figure 37.8 Cecil Beaton, ‘The Duchess of Windsor in a sequinned evening jacket by Mainbocher’, British Vogue, 9 June 1937. Bettmann via Getty Images.

examples of couture for his ground-breaking 1971 exhibition Fashion: An Anthology, an event which irrevocably changed the landscape of the museum and its relationship to fashion.70

conclusions from the archive Stepping into the museum’s archive, I look not for garments but for numbers, those ending in ‘1974’ to be precise. This is the date that Beaton’s vast collection was catalogued, three years after his show opened – it took that long. Here is where many of the couturiers that this chapter has not had time or words to reflect on rest, arranged alphabetically in their metal storage racks. Strange pairings can be found – Pierre Cardin and Callot Soeurs, Mariano Fortuny and Jacques Fath, Hubert de Givenchy and Madame 70

The jacket was featured in American Vogue, 1 June 1937, 52–7 and British Vogue, 9 June 1937, 54–6. V&A Museum number: T. 306–1974.

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Figure 37.9 Cristóbal Balenciaga, evening dress and cape, Paris, 1967. Victoria & Albert Museum: Given by Mrs Loel Guinness T.39&A-1974. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Grès – that seem to embody the interconnectedness of fashion and the echoes and revisitings that haunt it. Three garments have a place in this conclusion: first, an austerely sculptural black evening dress and cape made of silk gazar (a crisp woven fabric that holds its shape) made by the ‘master’ of twentieth-century haute couture, Cristóbal Balenciaga from 1967. High-necked and sleeveless, the dress flares from the shoulders to the knee at the front and then sweeps to the ground at the back. In a marvel of engineering, the dress is cut with a single seam. The cape is shorter and semicircular, with a similar asymmetrical curve (Figure 37.9).71 One hundred years on from Worth, the Spanish-born, Paris-based designer’s work had reached its apotheosis after a long career, his 71

V&A Museum number: T.37&A-1974.

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vision crystallized by a stripping back of excess, a renouncement of fastenings, zips, and buttons that reduced form to its essence, and in the case of this ensemble, to a textile form as bewildering (and difficult to copy) as a double helix. Vogue spoke of his ‘informed cutting, the superb construction inside and out’ and Chanel said: ‘Balenciaga alone is a couturier in the truest sense of the word. Only he is capable of cutting material, assembling a creation and sewing it by hand. The others are simply fashion designers.’72 This was said, perhaps, with an instinctive understanding that Balenciaga’s craft – and that of other great auteurs – both expressed the idea and was the idea, for despite his aesthetic distance from Worth, Balenciaga’s authorial insistence over material and what could be sculpted from it was never a collective one, but his vision alone. But visions take different forms. Christian Dior, not a hands-onmaterial creator, line-sketched his ideas, quickly determining a collection and its themes and then refining the ‘line’ as each model was worked up. ‘Have I expressed you correctly?’ his directrice technique and ‘“dressmaking” self’ Madame Marguerite used to say, when presenting him with a toile, as if her hands were avatars for his.73 And in Dior we find Worth again, in the plain silks, fabric bows, great skirts, and tight bodices of the ‘New Look’, with its echoes of fin de siècle Paris, and in photographs of his designs by Cecil Beaton infused with the spirit of the paintings of Winterhalter. Dior’s profligate use of materials after the deprivations of the Second World War seemed an affront to reason but kick-started an industry that had been worn as thin as the ersatz fabrics it had recourse to during the occupation of Paris. Despite – or perhaps because of – competition from America and the emergence of Italy’s alta moda, couture sailed into its ‘golden age’, buoyed by global publicity; Dior featured on the front cover of Time magazine and was rewarded with enormous international success, as were his compatriots – Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath, Lanvin-Castillo among the many. In the archive, to study ‘Bar’, his most enduring design – a tightly fitting, corseted and tailored 72

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Vogue, 15 April 1963, 54. Cited in Lesley Ellis Miller, Cristóbal Balenciaga (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), 14. Dior, Dior by Dior, 71, 14.

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Figure 37.10 Christian Dior, ‘Bar’ suit ‘La Ligne Corolle’, Paris 1947 (designed), 1955 (made). Victoria & Albert Museum: Given by Christian Dior T.376&A-1960 and T.377-1960. WATFORD / Mirrorpix via Getty Images.

cream jacket with wasp-waist and padded hips and a long, full black wool skirt that astonishes with its bulk and weight – is to be reminded of Dior’s statement ‘The first essential in couture: the feeling for materials’ (Figure 37.10).74 Perhaps not surprisingly, the house has chosen to revisit the ghost of ‘Bar’ in every catwalk show since Dior’s death in 1957. Finally, a dress by Madeleine Vionnet (1876–1975) who was described by British Vogue in 1925 as ‘perhaps the greatest 74

Christian Dior cited in Célia Bertin, Paris a la Mode (London: Gollancz, 1956), 195.

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geometrician of all the French couturiers’.75 Bell-sleeved and cowlnecked, the monasticism of her 1935 creation ‘Coq du Roche’ is only belied by the burnt orange hue of the bias-cut crêpe Romaine which falls in heavy folds and pools at the bottom of its Tyvek shroud, just as it would once have pooled around the feet of its wearer, Baroness Robert de Rothschild.76 It is clear that unlike the carapaces of Worth and Dior, this gown only comes to life on the body: ‘I was the first to do the bias cut . . . [it] was fluid, easy, promising.’ Like a sculptor, Vionnet’s technique was led by a profound understanding of the body’s skeletal armature and musculature and the way gravity helped shape the fall of fabric, an effect exquisitely captured by photographers such as Edward Steichen: ‘You don’t take the potentialities of a material into consideration when you’re only dealing with drawings. To do this you must work on a lay figure, and that is what I always did’ (Figure 37.11).77 Writing in his diary in 1974 Cecil Beaton lamented: ‘There are no silk flowers, there are no artists capable of cutting fabrics like Vionnet. This was part of a Proustian world, of which the present generation knows nothing.’78 Beaton’s fears can perhaps be allayed though, for this generation does care and knows a lot more about the world of couture and all the other global iterations of this fascinating industry, thanks to the commitment common to all the researchers, historians, and curators who have made publications such as this possible. Beaton also need not have feared that couture would collapse. Though still a small and elite part of the fashion industry its significance cannot be ignored as source of inspiration, experimentation, and a theatre for ideas that, as Worth showed, both publicizes and inspires the commercial and more accessible outputs of couture that drive the industry ever forward. Haute couture (to revert to its full title) still can only be produced in Paris today, where it is represented by a handful of designers – fourteen officially, by invitation only, including the old houses of Chanel, Schiaparelli, Dior, and 75 77

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British Vogue, 20 November 1925, 74. 76 V&A: T.445-1974. Cited in Pamela Golbin (ed.), Madeleine Vionnet (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 16. Hugo Vickers, The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as They Were Written (London: Phoenix, 2003), 438.

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Figure 37.11 Madeleine Vionnet, evening dress ‘Coq de Roche’, Paris, 1935. Victoria & Albert Museum: Given by the Baroness Elie de Rothschild T.445–1974. Roger Viollet via Getty Images.

Maurizio Galante along with relative newcomers such as Stéphane Rollande, Alexandre Vauthier, and Maison Margiela – and presented twice a year, in January and July. The global appeal of Parisian couture has found new audiences among Middle Eastern and Chinese clients in recent years, although still rare are those able to afford and appreciate a beaded and sequinned silk tulle sheath by Chanel that took four seamstresses 800 hours to craft in 2018, or a Giambattista Valli couture gown that took over 200 hours and 6,000 metres of fabric to create in 2020.79 Perhaps through the example of museum collections and 79

‘Corresponding’ and ‘guest’ members such as Iris van Herpen and Fendi Couture can swell the ranks. Divya Bala, ‘Everything You Need to Know about the Inner Workings of Haute Couture’, Vogue, 6 July 2020, www .vogue.co.uk/fashion/article/behind-the-scenes-at-haute-couture (accessed 25 April 2023); ‘It Took 800 Hours to Make This Chanel Dress’, The New York

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fashion exhibitions, long a source of inspiration for fashion designers, major houses increasingly value and professionally care for their own archives, just as Worth valued and kept his albums of designs. This has also led to an increased appreciation of the artisanal army that keeps couture going; Karl Lagerfeld’s haute couture show for Chanel in 2016 was staged as if inside an atelier with the designer taking a bow with some of his seamstresses at the end, while over the last few decades, the company has bought up many of the last surviving specialist workshops in order to ensure their survival, including the embroidery house of Lesage. All now operate with freedom under the umbrella organization Paraffection (‘for the love of’).80 Couture, like mainstream fashion, also increasingly sources expertise globally, with new centres of embroidery in India and China that have become part of couture’s wider family. However, this was always a hidden part of the couture system, for the House of Worth’s swan song perhaps lies in one of its most outrageous and colossally expensive commissions, the ‘Peacock Dress’, made for American-born Mary Curzon (1870–1906), Vicereine of India, for the Delhi Durbar Ball. This was held on 6 January 1903 to mark the coronation of King Edward VII (1841–1910) as Emperor of India at the height of British colonial rule over India, and at a time of French hegemony and patrimony as it expanded its African and Asian territories. The fabric of gold and silver Zardozi embroidery with green beetle wings and peacock motifs (a tribute to the Peacock throne) was hand-stitched in India by unnamed artisans before being shipped to Paris to be made up by Worth, the most famous ‘name’ in fashion, its spectacular allure dependent on the objectification and fetishization of objects and people from colonized nations.81

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Times, www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/t-magazine/chanel-couture-dress-how -its-made.html (accessed 25 April 2023). These include Guillet (est. 1869, fabric flowers); Barrie (est. 1870s, Scottish knitwear); Lemarié (est. 1880, plumes and camellias); Desrues (est. 1887, costume jewellery and buttons); Causse (est. 1892, gloves); Lesage (est. 1924, embroidery); Maison Michel (est. 1936, millinery); Montex (est. 1939, embroidery); Lognon (est. 1945, pleating); Massaro (est. 1947, shoes); Lanel (est. 1949, embroidery); and Goossens (est. 1950s, gold and silversmithing). See Nicola J. Thomas, ‘Embodying Imperial Spectacle: Dressing Lady Curzon, Vicereine of India 1899–1905’, Cultural Geographies, 14/3 (2007), 369–400. The Peacock dress is in the collection of Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire (National Trust collection number: NT107881).

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Figure 37.12 Christian Dior, Haute couture show Autumn/Winter 2021/ 2022, Paris, 5 July 2021. Peter White via Getty Images.

In the wake of a global pandemic which has impacted on every creative industry regardless of site or city, Christian Dior’s AW 2021 haute couture collection contributed towards a redressing of past wrongs, by showing the collection against a vast panorama of hand embroidery that had been made in India and carefully shipped, like the Peacock dress fabric, to Paris (Figure 37.12). But here it was with full acknowledgement of its source and makers for, as Maria Chiuri Grazia, the first woman auteur of the venerable house, observed, ‘It’s a metaphorical thing, to say that we are all connected.’82 82

Christian Dior Fall 2021 Couture Collection, Vogue, www.vogue.com/fash ion-shows/fall-2021-couture/christian-dior (accessed 10 August 2021).

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select bibliography Breward, Christopher, ‘Femininity and Consumption: The Problem of the Late Nineteenth-Century Fashion Journal’, Journal of Design History, 7/4 (1997), 71–89. Coleman, Elizabeth Anne, The Opulent Era: Fashions of Worth, Doucet and Pingat (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989). Daughton, J. P., ‘When Argentina Was “French”: Rethinking Cultural Politics and European Imperialism in Belle-Époque Buenos Aires’, Journal of Modern History, 80/4 (2008), 831–64. De la Haye, Amy and Edwina Ehrman (eds.), London Couture 1923– 1975: British Luxury (London: V&A Publishing, 2015). De la Haye, Amy and Valerie Mendes (eds.), The House of Worth: Portrait of an Archive, 1890–1914 (London: V&A Publishing, 2014). De Marly, Diana, Worth: Father of Haute Couture (London: Elm Tree Books, 1980). Evans, Caroline, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). Fukai, Akiko, ‘Japonism in Fashion’, in Japonism in Fashion: Tokyo (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Kurieishon Fesutibaru Jikko¯ Iinkai, 1996). www .kci.or.jp/en/research/dresstudy/pdf/e_Fukai_Japonism_in_Fashion .pdf (accessed 25 April 2023). Joseph, Abigail, ‘“A Wizard of Silks and Tulle”: Charles Worth and the Queer Origins of Couture’, Victorian Studies, 56/2 (2014), 251–79. Miller, Lesley E., ‘Perfect Harmony: Textile Manufacturers and Haute Couture 1947–57’, in Claire Wilcox (ed.), The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London, 1947–57 (London: V&A Publishing, 2007), 113–35. Palmer, Alexandra, Couture and Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002). Poiret, Paul, The King of Fashion: The Autobiography of Paul Poiret, trans. Stephen Haden Guest (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931; repr. London: V&A Publishing, 2009). Riello, Giorgio and Peter McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). Steele, Valerie, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (1988; repr., London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Thomas, Nicola J., ‘Embodying Imperial Spectacle: Dressing Lady Curzon, Vicereine of India 1899–1905’, Cultural Geographies, 14/3 (2007), 369–400.

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the origins and development of haute couture Troy, Nancy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Trubert-Tollu, Chantal, Françoise Tétart-Vittu, and Jean-Marie Martin-Hattemberg, The House of Worth, 1858–1954: The Birth of Haute Couture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017).

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COUTURE, PRÊT-À-PORTER, AND FAST FASHION SINCE 1945 simona segre reinach

introduction This chapter considers the major cultural and productive changes that occurred in the global fashion system after the Second World War, beginning with an emphasis on the West after 1945 and moving to the analysis of East Asian nations from the 1980s. In the thirty years after the end of the war, new players in Europe (especially of the new Italian prêt-à-porter) and North America (casualwear from the United States) came to challenge a system still dominated by Parisian fashion. A generation later, in the 1980s, the rise of Japanese fashion signalled the decline of a prevailing Western-centred system and the rise of a radical and experimental fashion centre. In the twenty-first century, the transformation of the Chinese economy and the development of digital technologies has led to new collaborations around what are called ‘national made ins’. A fluctuating global geography of fashion is based not just on one country succeeding another, but on the emergence of new cultural and production models.1 When considering the fashion industry, one has to acknowledge the many different elements that interact within a supply chain stretching from production to consumption. Production and consumption are in no sense separable as they are involved in a circularity that also includes post-consumption. Since the 1

Louise Crewe, The Geographies of Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).

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‘invention’ of haute couture, three ‘formal’ fashion production and consumption models have alternated over time. The first model revolves around the concept of luxury, understood as a manifestation of social status. This was the fashion that made its mark in the mid-nineteenth century, and continued until the early 1960s, the period that Lipovetsky defined as the ‘century of fashion’.2 Prestige and class membership were its founding concepts, and the couturier its interpreter. France played the lead role. The second model was prêt-à-porter. This deconstructed the culture of the exclusive atelier and focused on the concept of lifestyle, covering a vast middle class, as the consumer society expanded. Its interpreter was the fashion designer. Men and women came to be equally involved in fashion consumption practices, and the nineteenth-century ‘Great Male Renunciation’ retracted.3 Italian fashion played a key role in the dissemination of this model. The third production and cultural model is that of fast fashion, defined by the globalization of processes and the rapidity of proposal and reception. It is a way of dressing intended to immediately satisfy desire, in which everyone can create their own style. Fast fashion does not belong to any specific place, but to the new global fashion culture. Haute couture, prêt-à-porter, and fast fashion are therefore not only production systems but create imaginations and cultures within which consumption and communication practices are defined. With these systems all present together, haute couture exists today both in its traditional version – with the whole dress made by hand in the Parisian ateliers – and its technological versions, such as for example the 3D creations of Dutch virtual brand ‘The Fabricant’, and with the inclusion of non-European couturiers such as China’s Guo Pei. Prêt-à-porter includes the collections of corporate luxury brands as well as young independent designers. The fast fashion of the large chains coexists with small, local productions intended for market stalls. 2

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Gilles Lipovetsky, L’Empire de l’éphémère: La Mode et Son Destin dans les Sociétés Modernes (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). John Carl Flügel, ‘The Great Masculine Renunciation and Its Causes’, in Daniel Leonhard Purdy (ed.), The Rise of Fashion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 102–8. See also Chapter 21 by Christopher Breward in this volume.

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zeitgeist in the post-second world war period After the end of the Second World War, the return of Paris as the capital of fashion was as significant as was its long-term decline. Nazi Germany’s failed attempt to shift the French fashion system to Berlin and Austria confirmed the importance of location and of the local skills which had characterized French haute couture. In occupied Paris, the couturier and businessman Jacques Lelong, at the time Chairman of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, stated that haute couture was made above all from local craft skills and competences, making it a non-transferable system.4 Yet, Lelong and other couturiers had to contend with changing times. After the war, the United States came to influence the politics, culture, and economy of many countries by introducing more informal lifestyle elements, including in clothing. A new generation of designers – the so-called American Ingenuity current – created attractive, functional garments.5 Among them was Claire McCardell (1905–1958), known as the inventor of the ‘American Look’, a fresh and dynamic interpretation of fashion quite in opposition to Christian Dior’s formal and conservative ‘New Look’. The 1950s were dominated by ‘struggles’ and ‘confrontations’ between different national paradigms and especially between new fashion designers and producers in the United Sates, Italy and England, and the established names of Parisian fashion. The need to deconstruct aristocratic-bourgeois fashion – of which the French haute couture had been an expression – was felt across the Western world.6

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In doing so, he anticipated the theories of the fashion space and of genius loci. On the former, see John Potvin, ‘Introduction: Inserting Fashion into Space’, in John Potvin (ed.), The Places and Spaces of Fashion 1800–2007 (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 1–18; Crewe, The Geographies of Fashion. On the latter, see Christian Norberg–Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1979). Richard Martin, American Ingenuity: Sportswear 1930s–1970s (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998). All used to take inspiration from the Paris ateliers. European tailors and couturiers began to develop their own aesthetics, some due to their forced distancing from Paris during the French occupation and, in the case of Italy, due to the autarkic policies of the fascist regime. Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion under Fascism (Oxford: Berg, 2004).

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In this fight against French hegemony, Italian designers stood out.7 Often mentioned is the well-known fashion show organized by Giovanni Battista Giorgini in Florence in the winter of 1951.8 The event was a triumph, with an article in the influential Women’s Wear Daily declaring that the new-born Italian fashion was every bit as good as the French.9 This endorsement of Italian fashion was a thinly veiled declaration of the United States’ support for Italy, whose economy was bankrolled in the post-war period by the US Marshall Plan. In the following years, the Florentine catwalks held in the magnificent Sala Bianca at the Pitti Palace in Florence proposed an alternative to high fashion: similar to the French prêt-àporter de-luxe, Italians designed easier-to-make stylish clothes.10 Theirs were not simplified copies of haute couture creations, and yet they were not completely industrially made: what came to be known as moda boutique was an international success, sold on the dream of holidays in Capri, the Amalfi Coast, and Cortina, sea and mountain locations frequented by a cosmopolitan elite in love with the Italian lifestyle.11 7

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They were supported by the United States through the Marshall Plan that aimed to relaunch the Italian textiles industry. Nicola White, Reconstructing Italian Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Sonnet Stanfill (ed.), The Glamour of Italian Fashion since 1945 (London: V&A Publishing, 2014); Gianluigi Di Giangirolamo, Istituzioni per la moda. Interventi tra pubblico e privato in Italia e in Francia 1945–1965 (Milan: Mondadori-Pearson, 2020). The shows organized by Giovanni Battista Giorgini (1898–1971) marked the end of the monopoly of the French fashion designers and the start of Italian style. Valeria Pinchera and Diego Rinallo, ‘The Emergence of Italy as a Fashion Country: Nation Branding and Collective Meaning Creation at Florence’s Fashion Shows (1951–1965)’, Business History, 62/1 (2017), 151–78; Neri Fadigati, ‘Giovanni Battista Giorgini, la Famiglia, il Contributo alla Nascita del Made in Italy, le Fonti Archivistiche’, Zonemoda Journal, 8/1 (2018), 1–15. ‘Italy’s Golden Moment’, https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-features/ article-1177973/ (accessed 12 January 2021). Péretz Henri, ‘Le Vendeur, la Vendeuse et leur Cliente. Ethnographie du Prêt-à-Porter de Luxe’, Revue Française de Sociologie, 33/1 (1992), 49–72. Valerie Steele, Fashion Italian Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Vittoria Caterina Caratozzolo, ‘Reorienting Fashion: Italy’s Wayfinding after the Second World War’, in Stanfill (ed.), The Glamour of Italian Fashion, 46–57; Grazia D’Annunzio, ‘Paris and the Tale of Italian Cities’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), Paris, Capital of Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 93–115; Carlo Marco Belfanti, Storia Culturale del Made in Italy (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2019).

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Youth revolutions and style subcultures in England also rendered many of the bourgeois fashion rituals obsolete and placed London – and the Anglo-Saxon world more generally – at the centre of this change. The title London The Swinging City on the cover page of Time magazine in April 1966 alluded to the swinging pendulum of fashion from the exclusive Parisian ateliers to the London streets and districts such as Soho and Chelsea, frequented by young people determined to change social rules. With their subversive attitude towards the British class system and the miniskirts of Mary Quant – that harbinger of sexual liberation and greater attention to feminism – youth subcultures placed ‘the look’ at the centre of social change. Florence did not fit this new paradigm: it was perfect for its mix of aristocratic and casual look which pleased the American press and American buyers, but within twenty years it was superseded. The new Italian prêt-àporter which marked a freer and youthful fashion did not flourish in Florence, the city of Renaissance, as elitist and aristocratic as the names of its best-known designers such as Emilio Pucci and Simonetta di Cesarò. It was Milan, in the heartland of industrial Italy, that emerged as the capital of modern design and fashion.12 From a production point of view, the Italian fashion system was able to expand thanks to the application of a sizing system that was first developed to easily dress the American Army during the First World War and was extended to cheap civilian clothing in the late 1940s. After the Second World War, this system was perfected by Italian clothing manufacturers, among them Max Mara and Gruppo Finanziario Tessile (GFT).13 12

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Business was already carried out in Milan through textile fairs such as Mipel (1962) and Ideacomo (1968). Marina Cassa states that ‘The GFT invents mass ready-to-wear based on a brilliant intuition: measuring Italians. And so with an authentic measurement campaign the sizes are defined. It is a revolution that leads to 120 types’ (my translation). ‘Quando a Torino c’era persino la moda’, La Stampa, 21 November 2014, modified 24 June 2019, www.lastampa.it/torino/2014/11/ 21/news/quando-a-torino-c-era-persino-la-moda-1.35593665 (accessed 7 January 2021). See Susan P. Ashdown (ed.), Sizing in Clothing: Developing Effective Sizing Systems for Ready to Wear Clothing (Cambridge: The Textile Institute/CRC Press, 2007); Nicola White, ‘Max Mara and the Origin of Ready to Wear’, Modern Italy, 1/2 (1996), 63–80; Elisabetta Merlo, ‘The Ascendance of the Italian Fashion Brands (1970–2000)’, in Luciano Segreto, Hubert Bonin, Andrzej

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milan and the industrial preˆ t-a` -porter In the mid-1970s a new fashion model originated in Milan, that of the prêt-à-porter by the so-called stilisti.14 A slightly obsolete term today, stilisti comprises fashion designers and creative directors, and the expression is key to understand the emergence of a fashion identity in Italy. The work of the stilista was a unique creative project that became a template for fashion for a generation. Milanese prêt-à-porter was not a simplification of haute couture – like the French prêt-à-porter de-luxe, or a semi-artisanal product like Florentine moda boutique – but an innovation in post-war fashion culture and production.15 The forerunner of the movement was Walter Albini (1941–1983), the first to leave the shows in Florence for Milan. His aim was to create a perfect style, and not simply produce a perfect outfit as a couturier would: ‘Putting It Together’ was actually how Women’s Wear Daily defined Albini’s experiments. He shaped collections selecting garments from different companies he collaborated with, using the label ‘Walter Albini’.16 Albini can be considered as a transitional figure between the moda boutique and a brand system that did not yet exist.17

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K. Kozminski, and Carles Manera (eds.), European Business and Brand Building (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2012), 137–54; Ivan Paris, Oggetti Cuciti (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2006). Until then there was an alternation between women’s handmade haute couture and manufactured clothing, one intended as the original and the other as the copy, in a clear class-based hierarchy. Well-made off-the-peg clothes put an end to this dual fashion culture. Lipovetsky, L’Empire de l’éphémère. The word stilista cannot be translated in English into ‘stylist’ as it would mean something different. It is reported that, in the early 1970s, when industrialist Nino Cerruti introduced to friends Giorgio Armani, who worked for Cerruti’s company before starting his own business, as ‘Ecco il mio stilista’ [‘Here’s my stilista’] people would reply, ‘But what is a stilista?’ Minnie Gastel, 50 Anni di Moda Italiana (Milan: Vallardi, 1995). Marco Ricchetti and Enrico Cietta, Il Valore della Moda (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2006). Such as Callaghan, Misterfox, Escargots, Diamanti. There was not a specific place to show at the time, nor a precise calendar. Each stilista made up her/his own. Missoni held one at the recently opened and modern-designed Solari swimming pool in 1967. Deemed to be a controversial event, the journalist Maria Pezzi described it this way: ‘The last fashion show of the year was not only one of the funniest, but represented the entire spirit of current fashion. A cocktail with all the ingredients: the search for a strange place, the well-balanced representation of allusions and morbidity to Marat-Sade, but played by healthy actors and actresses who

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Eventually the stilisti founded their own companies, usually family businesses in a very Italian entrepreneurial tradition. As Giorgio Armani declared, being an entrepreneur was a consequence of being a designer.18 ‘Made in Italy’ combined innovation in style with industrial organization, production, logistics and distribution. Giorgio Armani, Mariuccia Mandelli aka Krizia, Gianfranco Ferré, Enrico Coveri, Franco Moschino, and Gianni Versace, to name only a few, were among the different expressions of the Milanese prêt-àporter.19 The formula included the control of the production and (often) distribution; the segmentation of the production lines according to price (as for instance in Giorgio Armani, Emporio Armani, Armani Jeans); the close collaboration with a photographer for the fine tuning of the brand image (for instance Giorgio Armani and Aldo Fallai); and the licensing system to ‘sign’ products other than garments. Fashion historian Emanuela Scarpellini describes the role of Italian stilisti in this way: They do not deal with a single production process or a garment, but create a style that marks a whole collection, or indeed characterizes a lifestyle and gives the brand an imprint; they mark the rhythm of modern fashion, accelerating the production processes with the alternating seasons, and make traditional models culturally obsolete; they become directors of the whole supply chain, managing the creation of the fabric, the design and the manufacturing process, and on to communication and direct relations with the consumers. After them, fashion would never be the same again.20

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had a lot of fun, the presentation of models, materials, new processes. The protagonist, the Missoni knitwear collection, from the success of Paris.’ http:// missoni.museomaga.it (accessed 7 January 2021). Gastel, 50 Anni di Moda iIaliana. Elisabetta Merlo and Francesca Polese, ‘Turning Fashion into Business: The Emergence of Milan as an International Fashion Hub’, Business History Review, 80/3 (2006), 415–47; Simona Segre Reinach, ‘Milan, the City of Prêt à Porter’, in Christopher Breward and David Gilbert (eds.), Fashion’s World Cities (Oxford: Berg, 2006) 123–34; Paolo Volonté, ‘Social and Cultural Features of Fashion Design in Milan’, Fashion Theory, 16/4 (2012), 399–432. Emanuela Scarpellini, La Stoffa dell’Italia. Storia e Cultura della Moda dal 1945 a Oggi (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2017), 156.

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In 1980s Italy, and internationally, many customers who could not afford a costly outfit from the designer’s first line could instead own a ‘piece of fashion’ by buying a small accessory, thus contributing to make fashion popular.21 From the 1960s to 1980s, at all price levels and across the entire fashion pyramid, ranging from Benetton to Versace, a greater connection between production and distribution helped the construction of brand value, deemed to be the foundation of quality and, above all, a guide for consumers. The model of the Milanese fashion production was not new – but it was new to fashion: it developed from the combination of design and industry and expanded on a large scale. Industrial design had begun in Milan soon after the Second World War with the work of architects such as Marco Zanuso, Vico Magistretti, and Achille Castiglioni.22 Fashion now applied these tenets in a new field. Post-war Milan was already the scene of several experiments in modern fashion: in the 1960s, the department store La Rinascente sold clothes by Pierre Cardin at a price lower than in the boutiques.23 Elvira Leonardi Bouyeure aka Biki – the couturière of Milanese high society and the storied soprano Maria Callas – designed the industrial GFT ready-to-wear label Cori from 1960 to 1966.24 Husband and wife Tai and Rosita Missoni started to design their colourful knitted garments of an easy but elegant make in 1953 in Varese, near Milan. Press, public relation agencies, and photography agencies had their headquarters in Milan. Small 21

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Prêt-à-porter in Milan acted as a unifying agent against the traditional rivalries among Italian fashion cities. After Turin in the first half of the twentieth century, in the 1950s the two main Italian cities of fashion were Florence for moda boutiqe and Rome for haute couture. Cinzia Capalbo, Storia della Moda a Roma (Rome: Donzelli, 2012). Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil Fallan (eds.) Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Experiments with design continued to be a characteristic of the Milan fashion, as the case of the fashion designer Nanni Strada, winner of the Compasso d’Oro prize in 1978, and later on Monica Bolzoni. Davide Fornari and Régis Tosetti (eds.), Bianca e Blu. Monica Bolzoni (Milan: Écal – Rizzoli, 2019). Elena Papadia, La Rinascente (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005). Simona Segre Reinach, Biki: French Visions for an Italian Fashion (Milan: Rizzoli, 2019). The GFT (Gruppo Finanziario Tessile) based in Turin produced ‘griffes’ such as Armani and Ungaro and also promoted industrial labels such as Cori and Facis.

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coffee shops such as Bar Giamaica in the Brera district were the meeting place for writers, photographers, journalists, and artists such as Alfa Castaldi and Anna Piaggi. They promoted a strong relationship between culture and fashion, a concept at the time not to be taken for granted, especially as Italian intellectuals considered fashion both ‘superficial’ and bourgeois. New shopping habits were fostered by modern stores targeting young people such as Elio Fiorucci’s Bazaar (opened in 1967), Gulp!, Drogheria Solferino, and Carnaby Street, inspired by Swinging London.25 Milan could also benefit from a consolidated heritage. ‘By the time of the advent of prêt-à-porter in the late 1970s’, write historians Pinchera and Rinallo: the idea that Italy was a country of fashion creators had already been circulating in international markets for more than two decades. This was, as a matter of fact, an intangible asset that the new generation of fashion designers could easily exploit. As a case in point, a special issue of Women’s Wear Daily dedicated to the 25th year of ‘Italian ready to wear’ in 1976, found similarities between the style of the new prêt-à-porter brands being shown in Milan (such as Basile, Callaghan and Genny) and some of their haute couture predecessors from Pitti’s Sala Bianca (Capucci, Mirsa and Pucci).26

This explains why Milan became a fashion capital in a very short time. The process started in 1972 when would-be stilisti left Florence for Milan – fascinated as they were by the dynamism of the city. By 1978 when Beppe Modenese (1929–2020) founded Modit, the agency regulating the prêt-à-porter fashion shows in Milan, the process was complete.27 Milan has easy access to the industrial textile districts, located in central and most especially in northern Italy.28 This enabled Milan to become the geographic and cultural centre of the 25

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Luisa Valeriani, Fiorucci. Quarant’anni di Arte, Design, Moda e Spettacolo (Rome: Meltemi, 2007). Pinchera and Rinallo, ‘The Emergence of Italy as a Fashion Country’, 18. The year 1978 also saw the agreement between GFT and Giorgio Armani, a milestone in regulating the formula of industrial design. Industrial districts are small, specialized areas scattered throughout the country that constitute the base of Italian manufacturing industry. These include Como for silk, Biella for wool, Carpi for knitwear, Castelgoffredo for hosiery, and the Italian Marches for footwear. Leopoldina Fortunati and Elda Danese, Il Made in Italy (Rome: Meltemi, 2005).

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new integrated industrial system of fashion that spanned from design to production.29 Fashion in Italy was also a political phenomenon linked to the rise of Milanese Bettino Craxi’s renewed Socialist Party.30 Craxi was the first politician to understand the relevance of fashion for the concept of Made in Italy. He is attributed the phrase ‘We fly in your planes, but you walk in our shoes’ to mean that fashion had to have a role in promoting Italy internationally, in the construction of a visual of great impact.31 Fashion and socialism worked in perfect harmony, dominating Milanese and Italian cultural life, and continued after Craxi’s dramatic political fall.32 In the 1980s, fashion was the central protagonist of the city’s life: extravagant shows were at their height; and Versace top models were common guests at sensational parties held in their honour. The concept of Made in Italy took on full meaning in combining style, fashion, furniture, and food. Giorgio Armani (Figure 38.1) featured on the cover of Time in 1982 – after Richard Gere starred in the film American Gigolo (1980) in a total Armani look. Armani’s sobriety and Versace glamour were the two sides of what Italy offered: Giorgio Armani presented new gender roles for new jobs; Versace instead explored sexuality and excess. In between, a cluster of designers offered customers all sorts of ‘lifestyles’ – a concept that replaced the idea of the dernier cri. Among them, Dolce & Gabbana (Figure 38.2) combined Milan and Sicily giving Italian regionalism new power through the work of photographer Ferdinando Scianna. But it was the photographer Helmut Newton who better interpreted the spirit of 1980s fashion – inserting Gianni Versace and Dolce & Gabbana in a wider aesthetic conceptual framework. Over two decades Milan consolidated its 29 30

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Ampelio Bucci, L’Impresa Guidata dalle Idee (Milan: Domus, 1992). Bettino Craxi (1934–2000) was a Member of Parliament from 1969 for the PSI (Italian Socialist Party). He was elected PSI National Secretary in 1976 and was the Prime Minister of Italy from 1983 to 1986. ‘Un Bettino 2.0’, Dagospia, 2 August 2014, www.dagospia.com/rubrica-3/ politica/bettino-luca-josi-ex-delfino-craxi-rivede-leader-psi-82183.htm (accessed 16 August 2017). In 1992, socialist politics came to be investigated by a group of anticorruption magistrates (Mani Pulite – literally ‘Clean Hands’) and Bettino Craxi had to flee Italy to escape conviction. He died in exile in Tunisia.

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Figure 38.1

Portrait of Giorgio Armani, 1979. David Lee via Getty Images.

position in global fashion and in Italian fashion gained a new aura when Vogue Italia became the most influential of the Condé Nast fashion publications.33

milan beyond the preˆ t-a` -porter The economic crisis of the 1990s, along with the excesses in brand extensions and the emergence of fast fashion, led to profound changes in the prêt-à-porter system.34 In the late 1990s, it gradually ceased to be the diffusionist and democratic model it once was. Among the emerging designers in Milan, Miuccia Prada became the promoter of 1990s minimalism and of a subtler, intellectual take on fashion which proved to be extremely successful. She modified the prêt-à-porter template – less brand segmentation, less licensing – and brought contemporary art closer to fashion. A new elitist vision of fashion was at hand. It was soon put forward 33 34

Vogue Italia was directed by Franca Sozzani from 1988 to 2006. Segre Reinach, ‘Milan, the City of Prêt à Porter’; Ricchetti and Cietta, Il valore della moda; Simona Segre Reinach, ‘Italian Fashion: The Metamorphosis of a Cultural Industry’, in Maffei and Fallan (eds.), Made in Italy, 239–54.

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Figure 38.2

Portrait of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, 1995. Andrea Blanch via Getty Images.

by the newly formed big luxury corporations, such as LVMH and Kering. Luxury became a necessity to promote fashion and availability faded in favour of limited edition and exclusivity. Heritage became a marketing tool to promote European brands in Asia and especially in China. China’s new interest in Western fashion brands contributed to accelerate the process. The fresh, groundbreaking spirit of the early years gave place to a more structured and thoughtful system: low-cost fast fashion on the one hand and (mass) luxury on the other.35 Meanwhile fast fashion – a new 35

Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello, Luxury: A Rich History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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organizational form in the fashion industry – hyper-popularized fashion through a low-cost strategy, often achieved through extreme outsourcing policies.36 Today Italian designers are less popular but not less inventive than their stilisti predecessors. They bring their skills as textile and collection experts and their insightful views on fashion to the large corporate groups they work for. They are both entrepreneurs and creative managers as they are employed as creative directors or creative consultants, and at the same time develop their own brands. In the third decade of the twenty-first century – differently from France and the United Kingdom – Italy has managed to maintain a manufacturing sector for the production of high-quality textile products led by small companies that work creatively. The Made in Italy symbol has transformed accordingly and has managed to keep up with the times – mostly changing with the needs of the new financial corporations which own and manage the majority of the fashion and luxury brands. The Kering group has long been supporting the Tuscan region and fashion pipeline, including opening laboratories that will allow the group to achieve its goals on sustainability.37 Italy is increasingly appreciated for specialized craft; the industrial + design formula of early days’ prêt-à-porter has been replaced by an emphasis on high craftsmanship and artisans.38 Among emerging trends, sustainability connected to artisan skills is certainly here to stay. The Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana (CNMI), the organizer of Milan fashion shows, is promoting itself as the European hub for the sustainability of the fashion industry’s supply chain. In 2021, Giorgio Armani, Miuccia Prada (Figure 38.3), and Dolce & Gabbana are still privately owned companies based in Milan – although their business is completely globalized. 36

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The expiration of the Multi Fiber Arrangement (MFA) completed the picture. The MFA governed the world trade in textiles and garments from 1974 to 1994, imposing quotas on the amount developing countries could export to developed countries. Its successor, the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC), expired on 1 January 2005. Luisa Zargani, ‘Kering to Support Restoration Works in Florence’, WWD, https://wwd.com/fashion-news/designer-luxury/kering-restoration-flor ence-palazzo-1234693272/ (accessed 12 January 2020). Alberto Cavalli, Il valore del mestiere (Venice: Marsilio, 2014). Fendi invited twenty ateliers from twenty regions to reinterpret the iconic Baguette bag – which was originally designed in 1997 by Silvia Venturini Fendi.

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Figure 38.3 Miuccia Prada walks the runway during the Prada Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2020–1 fashion show as part of Milan Fashion Week on 20 February 2020 in Milan, Italy. Victor VIRGILE / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

the japanese revolution and radical fashion From a global point of view, the history of fashion since the Second World War was about ‘provincializing Europe’, seemingly replacing one continent with another, first Europe with North America and later the West with Asia.39 Yet this provincialization of Europe and globalization of fashion is a more complex phenomenon characterized by polycentrism and a deconstruction of the 39

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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very notion of fashion. These changes were brought about by the so-called Japanese revolution (in Paris) in the 1980s and the Belgian Radical Fashion of the early 1990s, both promoters of a more abstract and conceptual fashion.40 The Japanese fashion shows held in Paris in 1981 when Issey Miyake, Joshi Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo presented their innovative collections, were the first to break down a monolithic notion of Western fashion. Such a break with the prevailing aesthetics of the time was expressed through asymmetries, irregularities, and imperfections. The predominance of dark colours, wide shapes, and bias cuts produced a sense of pauperism of the inspiration behind these clothing collections. It was a contrast with both the ‘managerial’ woman of Giorgio Armani, the most emblematic designer of the Italian school, and with the typical ‘hourglass’ shape of the most traditional Parisian creations. These three Japanese fashion designers – who had already achieved success in Japan – promoted a new style that rejected the diktats of gender and occasion and took Paris by storm. It was an aesthetic vision related to Punk but produced within haute couture; it flirted with subcultures but it did not ‘bubble up’ from the street as cultural historian Dick Hebdige described just a couple of years earlier.41 Japanese fashion was proof that an overlap between the marginal and ritual subcultures of bourgeois society had lost their raison d’être. The Japanese contribution to modern fashion also renewed the term avantgarde in a system that since the 1930s work of creators such as Elsa Schiaparelli had partially lost a sense of innovation. As the Japanese revolution took place in Paris rather than Japan, it also paved the way for French fashion to return to the stage as an innovating force. The Japanese revolution was also the recognition of a modern Asia, heralding a break with old stereotypes, at least those in force from the imperial time of the great divide between ‘East and West’. It was above all a break with the very idea that designers had to be Western, or Westernized, and consequently, with the stereotyped 40

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Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Anneke Smelik, Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979).

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representation of Asia expressed in the various orientalist moments and, in the specific case, in Japanism. The comments of the period show how strong the Eurocentrism of fashion was, crystallizing the Japanese aesthetic sensitivity and tradition in positive and negative stereotypes. In the 1980s, following Japan’s successful expansion into Western economic markets, the French media circulated both positive and negative images of Japan to explain the secret to Japanese success and openly criticized the country’s ‘economic invasion’ of Western markets.42 The practice of deconstruction exercised by Japanese designers – which resounded Jacques Derrida’s philosophy – involved both Western and Japanese sartorial traditions. By doing so, the very mechanics of the dress structure was unveiled. This approach was developed as well by Belgian designer Martin Margiela (1957–) and by the so-called Antwerp 6 – a group comprising the six designers Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Van Saene, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, and Marina Yee.43 They are associated with the practice of deconstruction, to be known as Radical Fashion, to differentiate the approach from more institutional fashion systems such as the French and Italian (Figure 38.4). According to Flavia Loscialpo: The disruptive force of their [Antwerp 6 designers’] works resided not only in their undoing the structure of a specific garment, in renouncing to finish, in working through subtractions or displacements, but also, and above all, in rethinking the function and the meaning of the garment itself. With this, they inaugurated a fertile reflection questioning the relationship between the body and the garment, as well as the concept of ‘body’ itself.44

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Kyoko Koma, Mode et stéréotypes interculturels. Le cas des articles consacrés aux couturiers japonais dans Le Figaro et Libération (1981– 1992) (Saabrücken: Éditions Universitaires européennes, 2012). Geet Bruloot and Kaat Debo, 6+ Antwerp Fashion (Ghent: Ludion Editions, 2007). Flavia Loscialpo, ‘Fashion and Philosophical Deconstruction: A Fashion InDeconstruction’, in Alissa de Witt Paul and Mira Crouch (eds.), Fashion Forward (Freeland: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011), 13–27.

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Figure 38.4

Dries Van Noten, Spring/Summer Prêt-à-Porter collection. THIERRY ORBAN / Sygma via Getty Images.

This new wave of conceiving fashion also generated discussions on gender roles and binary definitions at large.45 The innovative formula of Antwerp fashion, an Academy and a Museum entirely devoted to fashion as expressions of both art and industry, attracted students and designers interested in exploring the forefront of fashion.46 Although the city of Antwerp does not strictly belong to the network of the fashion capitals (London, Milan, Paris, New York) and does not host a fashion week, it has become a crucial place to appreciate fashion as a cultural industry.47 The legacy of the Belgian School can be seen today in designers such as Raf Simons, Demna Gvasalia,48 Haider Ackermann, Kris Van Assche, and many others at Flemish academies. 45

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Nicola Brajato and Alexander Dhoest, ‘Practices of Resistance: The Antwerp Fashion Scene and Walter Van Beirendonck’s Subversion of Masculinity’, Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, 7/1–2 (2020), 51–72. Bruloot and Debo, 6+ Antwerp Fashion. Javier Gimeno Martínez, ‘Selling Avant-Garde: How Antwerp Became a Fashion Capital (1990–2002)’, Urban Studies, 44/12 (2007), 2449–64. Adam Geczy and Vicky Karaminas, ‘Time, Cruelty and Deconstruction in Deconstructivist Fashion, Margiela and Vetments’, ZoneModa Journal, 10/1 (2020), 65–77.

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By the end of the twentieth century, the geography of fashion was largely polycentric and its productive models multiple. Another huge change in the production and dissemination of fashion occurred with the rise of China.

the twenty-first century: global china China is a main driver of change in the twenty-first century’s system of global fashion. Its economic and cultural power marks a turning point in the history of fashion, achieved in just forty years with a strong acceleration in the last decade.49 The first Chinese Fashion Week was held in Shanghai in 2001. Shanghai Fashion Week 2020 was the first in the world to be held entirely digitally, initiating a new mode of communication that was followed by many Fashion Weeks worldwide. Once considered a country that produced fashion designed elsewhere, China in the twenty-first century has become the main purchaser of the very products it manufactures. While for many Chinese designers the ambition is still to be successful in the West, China decides the success of Western designers by opening its vast domestic market where most fashion brands’ revenues are today made.50 As well, China can ban specific firms from its market, if brands do not fit with its nationalistic policy. Today, the global luxury brands support Chinese designers who take inspiration from historical Chinese cultural references, as in the case of Yueqi Qi, promoted by Alessandro Michele, the Italian former creative director of Gucci. As I have written elsewhere, the process of Asian engagement with Western fashion has in fact demanded a complete rethinking and repositioning of the luxury brands, thus demonstrating that what has come to be known as ‘global fashion’ is not merely the mechanical expansion of the realm of brands, but required 49 50

See Chapter 24 by Antonia Finnane in this volume. Cristopher Breward and Juliette MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); Simona Segre Reinach, ‘The Identity of Fashion in Contemporary China and the New Relationships with the West’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, 4/1 (2012), 57–70; Simona Segre Reinach, ‘From Joint Ventures to Collaborative Projects: Toward an Ethnography of Sino-Italian Fashion Relations in the 2020s’, Fashion Theory, 25/7 (2021), 931–44.

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a profound reinterpretation.51 It was not an easy start: what had been ‘granted’ to Japan,52 which because of its history was considered a Western outpost in Asia, was not similarly granted to China. This nation was largely closed to the most significant experiences of modern fashion in the period between the Second World War and the 1980s. A small reminder might be useful here: in the Western world, the anti-bourgeois social movement of the 1960s and 1970s helped to create youth fashion that was to pave the way for what we might call a new post-bourgeois fashion. But in China the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) led to the utopic abolition of fashion as a bourgeois value, in favour of uniformity instead.53 A clear divide between bourgeois dress and revolutionary attire replaced the more sartorially nuanced decade of the 1950s characterized by influences from the Soviet Union and the West.54 During the Cultural Revolution everything belonging to the past, or conceived as intellectual or decadent, was banned. Frugality, simplicity, and sobriety were the key features of a new Chinese lifestyle that included dress.55 The qipao, or cheongsam, was abolished, an important sartorial statement of modern Chinese dress for women; permed hair was forbidden and floral dresses too.56 Examples of sartorial dictatorship are many and frightening: young women were seized by the Red Guards and forced to remove their fashionable garments and

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Simona Segre Reinach, ‘One Fashion, Two Nations: Italian-Chinese Collaborations’, in Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Yanagisako (eds.), Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of ItalianChinese Global Fashion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). Toby Slade, Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 2009). Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Antonia Finnane, ‘Lost in Socialist Transformation? Shanghai Style under Mao’, in Breward and MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai, 181–210. Juanjuan Wu, Chinese Fashion: From Mao to Now (Oxford: Berg, 2009). Valerie Steele and John S. Major, China Chic: East Meets West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Wu, Chinese Fashion. On the qipao, see Hazel Clark, The Cheongsam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Wessie Ling, ‘Nationalism, Women and Their China: What More the Chinese Talk about When They Talk about the Qipao?’, TECHSTYLE Series 1.0 (2017), 92–101; Bian Xiangyang and Yan Lanlan, ‘Shanghai Qipao, 1925–49’, in Breward and MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai, 67–86; and Finnane, ‘Lost in Socialist Transformation?’

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shoes in front of the crowd in order to be shamed in public. During one of the most notorious public interrogations, a woman was forced to wear a qipao and high-heeled shoes – the pre-Mao Chinese attire – with a necklace of ping pong balls to be mocked, while being denounced as a bourgeois.57 The ‘Jiang Qing dress’ case is indicative of fashion at the time: the dress was designed by Mao’s second wife, Jiang Qing, in 1974 with the intent to create a national dress for women to break the monotony of the asexual look of the Revolution.58 Designed with the help of Beijing Opera costume designers, its production in 80,000 pieces was assigned to a Tianjin state-owned firm. The design quoted classic elements from the Song, Han, and Tang dynasties mixed with elements of 1950s Western dress. The dress was a complete failure both aesthetically and economically, as it turned out to be too expensive to produce. It was the ultimate proof of China’s estranged relationship with modern fashion.59 When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, a series of economic reforms started with Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy (1978) to promote social and economic change in China. Modern fashion started to penetrate China, though officially the resistance to bourgeois culture remained a focus of the Communist Party.60 Controversy and unease characterized the period, as historian Juanjuan Wu clearly explains.61 The return of fashion in China after 1978 was a slow process, almost imperceptible and affecting only people in the large cities, and especially young women.62 After more than a decade of isolation, people simply did not know what to wear: the idea of going back to the 1930s qipao for women – an attire which evoked colonial Shanghai – and for men a mix of Western suit, Confucius attire, and Mao jacket was untenable. It 57

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Valerie Steele and John S. Major, ‘China Chic: East Meets West’, in Valerie Steele and John S. Major (eds.), China Chic: East Meets West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 69–99. Finnane, ‘Lost in Socialist Transformation?’ Finnane, Changing Clothes. John Vollmer, ‘Chinese Dress’, Bibliographic Guides, Bloomsbury Fashion Central, www.bloomsburyfashioncentral.com/article?docid=b-9781474280655 &tocid=b-9781474280655-BIBART19001 (accessed 3 January 2021). Wu, Chinese Fashion. Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 1999).

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was mainly through exposure to media, like television and radio music around Asia, that the Chinese familiarized themselves once again with the world outside China and with bell-bottomed trousers, blue jeans, sunglasses, and floral dresses. These were perceived in China as symbols of individuality and freedom.63 The Western men’s suit – made in China to promote the local garment industry – was also endorsed by the government.64 The most inspirational icons came from Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. The Taiwanese singer Theresa Teng (Deng) (1953–1995) was much admired in China for her love songs and beautiful dresses.65 Fashion magazines, abolished during the Revolution, appeared again in the 1980s. Meanwhile more Chinese came in contact with Western fashion. This happened first because Western designers were quick to move into China. The first among them was the French-Italian designer Pierre Cardin (1922–2020) in 1979, followed over the next twenty years by most Western brands.66 On Pierre Cardin’s shows in Beijing and Shanghai Juanjuan Wu reports: ‘Due to their “sensitive nature”, only professionals were permitted to attend Cardin’s shows. Nevertheless, the shows were a sensation. Paris fashion, a perfect manifestation of the capitalist lifestyle, had been a taboo subject for decades in China, and its vivid display in front of the Chinese audience left them speechless.’67 Second, the relocation of Western fashion production to China – starting from the 1980s – was perhaps even more important in the promotion of a Chinese fashion industry. Thanks to Western outsourcing to Asia, Chinese managers rapidly learned production techniques, collections assembling, and marketing, gaining knowledge of fashion trends. They acquired both material and immaterial notions on fashion.68 63 64

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Mei Hua, Chinese Clothing (Beijing: China Intercontinental Press, 2004). Yuan Ze and Yue Hu, A Century of Chinese Fashion 1900–2000 (San Francisco: Sinomedia International Group China Books, 2016). Sijia Yao, ‘Teresa Teng in Diaspora: Affective Replacement in Chinese World-Making’, Comparative Literature Studies (Special issue on ‘The Eighth Sino-American Symposium in Comparative and World Literature’), 57/3 (2020), 520–9. Vogue China opened in 2005. 67 Wu, Chinese Fashion, 166. Simona Segre Reinach, ‘Italian and Chinese Agendas in the Global Fashion Industry’, in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History

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Production did not change the image of the nation, however: ‘Made in China’ had a long way to go to shrug off a reputation for low-cost, poor-quality garments in favour of China as a key player in the global fashion system. Sino-Italian joint ventures represented an important phase in this transition. Specific Chinese brands were the outcome of joint ventures for the Chinese market. These collaborations faced many challenges and proved unsuccessful in the long run. Italian companies considered their Chinese partners to be facilitators in their strategy of penetration of the Chinese market or ways to produce at lower cost part of the garments destined for the Western market. In both cases they were willing to give away as little know-how as possible. For them, China was the ‘factory of the world’: creativity and design were to remain firmly in the West where there was a long tradition of innovation. Chinese companies, on the other hand, were keen to learn marketing and branding in order to enter international markets with their own local brands.69 These partnerships revived colonial stereotypes such as that of the ‘Chinese tailor’ who copies even the faults of the commissioned dress; they reinforced a division between ‘author countries’ and ‘manufacturing countries’. Yet at the same time they ignited a process of cross-fertilization between Asia and the West, especially in the production of high-end prêt-àporter garments. Chinese designers rapidly transformed their way of conceiving design, production, and distribution, by attending prestigious international fashion schools such as Parsons New York, Central Saint Martins London, and Marangoni Milan (some of which have also opened branches in China), and by renewing Chinese fashion schools such as Shanghai Donghua University, Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, Tsinghua University, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Graduate designers acquired the ability to interpret consumer needs. Today mainland Chinese designers are an important component of the Chinese fashion system and are fast becoming part of international fashion together with Chinese-American and Chinese

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Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010) 217–34; Segre Reinach, ‘One Fashion, Two Nations’. Reinach, ‘One Fashion, Two Nations’.

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diaspora designers.70 This has been achieved with difficulty. But Chinese fashion designers today play a significant role in the global arena, especially with the growing relevance of the digital world in the post-pandemic fashion industry.71 Mainland Chinese designers have a complex history. For several decades, the development of fashion design in China also suffered from the conceptual separation between fashion seen as art and clothing seen as commerce, in a context of minimal consumer culture, lack of marketing, and interference by the state in private enterprises. According to Christine Tsui, early fashion designers (pioneers) started their activities when fashion – at least as defined in the West – did not exist in China.72 The first designers in the post-Reform Era were costume designers. They had little idea of the Western fashion system and could deal with the artistic but not the commercial side of fashion. The genesis of fashion in China, thus, comes from art and theatrical costume.73 It also meant that the production of low-cost apparel for export was considered to be part of commerce, but not of fashion. Tsui defines the second generation of fashion designers as ‘practitioners’, thereby indicating their ability to cover all aspects of design. This allowed them to consolidate the idea of a Chinese fashion industry, opening the way to Chinese brands.74 The third generation of designers, who Tsui 70

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Christina Moon, ‘Ethnographic Entanglements: Memory and Narrative in the Global Fashion Industry’, in Heike Jenß and Chris Breward (eds.), Fashion Studies: Research, Method, Sites and Practices (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 66–82; Anja Cronberg, ‘“There Will Never be a Chinese Fashion”: Staking a Claim for Shanghai as a Fashion City’, in Breward and MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai, 287–308. Michael Keane and Guanhua Su, ‘When Push Comes to Nudge: A Chinese Digital Civilisation In-The-Making’, Media International Australia, 173/1 (2019), 3–16; Jin Yating, ‘A Mechanism of the Chinese Fashion System’, Fashion Theory, 26/5 (2022), 595–621; Christine Chou, ‘What Shanghai’s First Digital Fashion Week Meant for Brands and Designers’, www.alizila .com/what-shanghais-first-digital-fashion-week-meant-for-brands-and-de signers/ (accessed 3 January 2021). Christine Tsui, China Fashion: Conversations with Designers (Oxford: Berg, 2009). Bao Mingxin and Juanjuan Wu, Shimao Cidian [A Fashion Dictionary] (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenhua Chubansha, 1999). Ma Ke and Wang Yi-Yang belong to the ‘practitioners’ generation. Ma Ke was the designer who introduced the concept of ‘slow fashion’ in China, and produces two lines: Exception, founded in 1996; and Useless/Wuyong,

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calls ‘prospects’, consciously relate to global fashion and contribute to outlining the profile and value of Chinese fashion.75 Nowadays designers in China (working for giant brands such as Metersbonwe and Bosideng), and Chinese designers working outside China are too many to list. A unique system of digital marketing based on social networks, celebrities, and e-commerce is now defining fashion made in China.76 One designer who stands out, however, is Guo Pei (1967–), as she contributed to the popularization of Chinese craftsmanship and high fashion, against everpresent prejudice. Guo Pei graduated at Beijing Light Industry School in 1986. After working in a state-owned textile company, she founded her own brand Rose Studio in 1997. She was at the centre of the exhibition ‘China Through the Looking Glass’ at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2015.77 The exhibition paid homage to Chinese culture and soft power by historicizing the influence of China – past and present – on Western art and fashion.78 Western dresses, films, craft, and artefacts inspired by China were presented. The only Chinese dress was Guo Pei’s: a luxury handmade piece that showed the capacity of Chinese designers to produce haute couture. Fashion icon and pop singer Rihanna sported Guo Pei’s dress on the red carpet of the MET Gala Event: a canary yellow, silk long-tail dress, 25 kg in weight, that required 50,000 hours of work to complete. The dress was the talk of the town.79 Media coverage confirmed the relevance of China’s aesthetics in contemporary art and fashion. In the same year, Guo Pei held her first solo exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs

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launched in 2006, a haute couture line of collectors’ items based on the principle of ecology and the reuse of existing garments. Wang Yi-Yang also markets two lines, Cha Gang and ZucZug. Cha Gang line is inspired by the mugs of the Cultural Revolution, white with a blue edge – the only household item always available in those years of poverty. Among them Tsui includes Lu Kun and Ji Ji. Tsui, China Fashion. Sindy Liu, Patsy Perry, and Gregory Gadzinski, ‘The Implications of Digital Marketing on WeChat for Luxury Fashion Brands in China’, Journal of Brand Management, 26 (2019), 395–409; Yingjiao Xu, Ting Chi, and Jin Su (eds.), Chinese Consumers and the Fashion Market (Singapore: Springler, 2020). On the exhibition, see Chapter 24 by Antonia Finnane in this volume. Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/oct/18/guo-pei-chinese-designer-who -made-rihanna-omelette-dress (accessed 12 January 2021).

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Figure 38.5 Guo Pei acknowledges the audience at the end of her fashion show during the 2018 Spring/Summer Haute Couture collection on 24 January 2018 in Paris. PATRICK KOVARIK / AFP via Getty Images.

in Paris and was honoured as an invited member of the Parisian Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture (Figure 38.5).

china and the new geography of fashion The rise of Chinese fashion has led to a rethinking of fashion cities within ‘wider geographies’.80 As Andrew Zhao observes: ‘The Chinese fashion systems do not exist in isolation from the rest of the world, even though different fashion systems are connected to the global fashion industry in different ways.’81 China participates in shaping global fashion luxury by manufacturing most of the garments in the world, by purchasing Western brands in need of

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David Gilbert and Patrizia Casadei, ‘The Hunting of the Fashion City: Rethinking the Relationship between Fashion and the Urban in the Twenty-First Century’, Fashion Theory, 24/3 (2020), 393–408. Michael Zhao, The Chinese Fashion Industry: An Ethnographic Approach (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 66.

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financial support,82 and by creating new international networks and new collaborations.83 Today, these collaborations are no longer ‘one-way’ agreements – the West designs; China makes – as was the case of early joint ventures. They also no longer promote an opposition between Europe and Asia, nor an ‘East Meets West’ attitude.84 At first glance, the formation of contemporary Chinese fashion offers a compelling example of cultural, economic, and political entanglement across the globe.85 At a closer look, Chinese modernity in the twenty-first century cannot merely be underscored by Chinese hybridity: ‘Rather it entails a power dynamic between China and the rest of the world, whereby constant negotiation is expected.’86 The result is a multi-faceted Chinese aesthetic identity yet strongly oriented to representing Chinese modernity.87 Global Chinese fashion impacts local fashions, just as Chinese influencers are gaining global coolness: There’s something strangely thrilling about lying in bed watching Chinese streetwear fashion TikToks, but lately, that seems to be all I’ve been doing . . . Watching these videos taught me that I didn’t actually understand contemporary fashion in mainland China, which is fresh and new and, yes, primarily defined by the context of China’s consumer culture but has evolved to become its own style. It’s especially refreshing to see Chinese streetwear fashion incorporating traditional Chinese clothing, such as reinterpretations of ‘hanfu’ and

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Among which the Italian Krizia, Roberta di Camerino, Sergio Tacchini, and Miss Sixty. Yating, ‘A Mechanism of the Chinese Fashion System’. Wessie Ling and Simona Segre Reinach, ‘Fashion-Making and Co-creation in the Transglobal Landscape: Sino-Italian Joint Ventures as a Method’, Modern Italy, 24/4 (2019), 401–15; Segre Reinach, ‘From Joint Ventures to Collaborative Projects’. Wu Zhiyan, Janet Borgeson, and Jonathan Schroeder, From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Wessie Ling and Simona Segre Reinach, ‘Fashion-Making in the Transglobal Landscape’, in Wessie Ling and Simona Segre Reinach (eds.), Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 1–2. Juanjuan Wu, Yue Hu, Lei Xu, and Marylin DeLong, ‘Designed in China: Multiple Approaches to Fashion and Retail’, in Ling and Segre Reinach (eds.), Fashion in Multiple Chinas, 69–93.

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simona segre reinach other forms of reinventing outfits historically significant in Chinese culture.88

In 2005 Antonia Finnane claimed that ‘fashion was one of the many areas in which the opening of a dialogue between China and the rest of the world occurred in the late 1970s’.89 In 2021 we can add that China is now leading this dialogue by shaping the global fashion industry. ‘While scholars across the globe have enriched the geography of fashion by studying locations beyond the “big four”, there remains a need for better understanding of fashion centers from global and evolutionary perspective.’90 In twenty-first-century society, fashion is a fundamental pillar of soft power for many nations.91 Increasingly intertwined with the media, and with other forms of art and culture, as a fully-fledged member of the digital world, fashion represents a kind of imagined community, in the meaning of the term coined by Benedict Anderson.92 Fashion also transcends individual cultures, nations, and cities, understood by all, as it re-proposes its original characteristics in a continuous evolution.

conclusion From Paris, the first recognized city of fashion, a progressive movement that began in the second half of the twentieth century led to the current polycentric configuration of fashion. Milan challenged Paris in the late 1970s as it promoted a new productive and cultural system – that of industrial prêt-à-porter – to replace the elitist 88

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Valerie Wu, ‘Soft Power: Chinese Streetwear Fashion Affirms Coolness’, Daily Troyan, 2 November 2020, https://dailytrojan.com/2020/11/02/softpower-chinese-streetwear-fashion-affirms-coolness/ (accessed 26 January 2021). Antonia Finnane, ‘Looking for the Jiang Qing Dress: Some Preliminary Findings’, Fashion Theory, 9/1 (2005), 257. Ben Wubs, Mariangela Lavanga, and Alice G. Janssens, ‘Letter from the Editors: The Past and Present of Fashion Cities’, Fashion Theory, 24/3 (2020), 320. McNeil and Riello, Luxury; Victoria L. Rovine, African Fashion: Global Style (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Agnes Rocamora, ‘Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion’, Fashion Theory, 21/5 (2017), 505–22; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).

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c o u t u r e , p r eˆ t - a` - p o r t e r , a n d f a s t f a s h i o n

model of haute couture. Thanks to its potential to reach different targets, industrial prêt-à-porter became the most widespread and practised fashion system in the world. The economic growth of China and the fact that it is both the strongest producer and the largest consumer of clothing has impressed a further change on the fashion system. The twenty-first century opened with the decline of a Eurocentric perspective on fashion and with the intensification of global exchanges. On the one hand, today people are more connected and exposed to the same fashion information. On the other, the ‘democratic’ model of 1970s prêt-à-porter has been replaced by extreme luxury on one side and low prices – fast fashion – on the other. For some time now the three systems described above – haute couture, prêt-à-porter, and fast fashion – have been marked by a far-reaching trend, that of sustainable fashion.93 The ‘Who Made My Clothes’ movement, founded in 2003, has led to the annual ‘Fashion Revolution’ days, and the Copenhagen Summits linked to environmental and cultural aspects, demonstrating how sustainability profoundly affects the very foundations of fashion.94 Sustainability is not only a new production style but also a new cultural model for fashion that crosses and changes the previous models at all latitudes. It also aims to protect customers and workers and reduce the industry’s environmental impact on our planet. Sustainability shapes the working methods of the designers themselves, who are under pressure to produce several collections a year – rather than the traditional two per year – to satisfy a crowded and competitive market. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many aspects of sustainability have been discussed with a view to redesigning the whole fashion system. The concept of fashion has moved away from the expression of lifestyles as it was in the twentieth century, and involves today a sense of 93

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Margaret Maynard, ‘Fast Fashion and Sustainability’, in Sandy Black, Amy de la Haye, Joanne Entwistle, Regina Root, Agnès Rocamora, and Helen Thomas (eds.), The Handbook of Fashion Studies (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 542–56; Sandy Black, The Sustainable Fashion Handbook (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012); Kate Fletcher, Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). The first Summit was held in 2008.

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community, of multiple connections and cross-fertilizations across nations.

select bibliography Breward, Christopher and Juliette MacDonald (eds.), Styling Shanghai (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Crewe, Louise, The Geographies of Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). D’Annunzio, Grazia, ‘Paris and the Tale of Italian Cities’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), Paris, Capital of Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 93–115. Finnane, Antonia, Changing Clothing in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Kawamura, Yuniya, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2004). Lees-Maffei, Grace and Fallan Kjetil (eds.), Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Ling, Wessie and Simona Segre Reinach (eds.), Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018). Merlo, Elisabetta and Francesca Polese, ‘Turning Fashion into Business: The Emergence of Milan as an International Fashion Hub’, Business History Review, 80/3 (2006), 415–47. Segre Reinach, Simona, ‘From Joint Ventures to Collaborative Projects: Toward an Ethnography of Sino-Italian Fashion Relations in the 2020s’, Fashion Theory, 25/7 (2021), 931–44. Segre Reinach, Simona, ‘Milan, the City of Prêt à Porter’, in Christopher Breward and David Gilbert (eds.), Fashion’s World Cities (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 123–34. Slade, Toby, Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 2009). Stanfill, Sonnet (ed.), The Glamour of Italian Fashion since 1945 (London: V&A Publishing, 2014). Steele, Valerie, Fashion Italian Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Wu, Juanjuan, Chinese Fashion: From Mao to Now (Oxford: Berg, 2009). Zhao, Michael, The Chinese Fashion Industry: An Ethnographic Approach (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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CASUALWEAR AND ITS BIRTH IN JAPAN toby slade

introduction: casualness and casualwear Casualness has perhaps always been present in clothing. Maybe even Julius Caesar’s loose-hung toga, sometimes read as a form of dandyism, was a move familiar in casualwear, changing the vocabulary of the sartorial norm to appear more relaxed, with something of an old-money swagger to it, to enact generational distinction, and to visually challenge the formality of a previous order.1 Casualness is not the same as informality or the unformed, indeed it is often as consciously put-together and structurally considered as formalwear, but it uses a vocabulary of relaxation of clothing rules, or total disregard for them to symbolize a change in values and generation. While acknowledging that this fashion move has been available and used throughout all clothing history and perhaps across all cultures, this chapter focuses on casualwear becoming a global industry and one of the dominating fashion meta-styles from the 1960s. This chapter will use the fashion moves of 1960s Japan to describe not only the particular Japanese transition from formal

1

Suetonius wrote of Caesar that ‘They say he was remarkable in his dress, that he wore the broad-striped tunic, with fringed sleeves reaching to the wrist, and always had a belt overtop [super eum cingeretur], though rather a loose one [quidem fluxiore cinctura], and this, they say, was the occasion of Sulla’s mot, when he often warned the optimates to beware the ill-girt boy [ut male praecinctum puerum cauerent]’. Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Volume 1: Julius Caesar (Project Gutenberg, n.d.), 45.

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clothing norms towards casualwear and the establishment of a casualwear industry, but also will imply, albeit gently, a more universal pull towards the casual as a sartorial correlative, a form of metaphorical enactment, for new political and social freedoms. These freedoms had been, by and large, enabled in Japan by America’s Second World War victory over Japan and were being aggressively promoted to the world by the United States as one side of the subsequent superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union. The demographic bubble of the baby-boomer generation eagerly took up this style interpreting freedom as widely as possible. Casualwear was not only an expression of geo-politics but also of generational discontent and it was seen as a chance to renegotiate levels of social control enforced on the body via clothes and related dictates of social formality. The optimistic belief that a change of clothes could enact new political realities was a sartorial ambition attempted a number of times in the early twentieth century, made possible by a particular alignment of economic growth, educational expansion, industrial capacity, and new media in the 1960s. A key question to be addressed is how did financial resources, and indeed an entire casualwear industry, come to be devoted overwhelmingly to a segment of the market with little money of their own: youth? And indeed, how did this liminal stage of life rise towards pre-eminence in the fashion industry? This parallels other popular culture dynamics of the time such as in music where the adult-popular, late 1950s genres of jazz, swing, and easy listening were displaced by youth-popular early 1960s rock and roll, representing not just a change in taste but also a change in the generation dominating popular culture consumption. These dynamics were global and most surely were born of the reordering of the world in the wake of the Second World War and the generational disillusionment of the baby boomers who came of age in the early 1960s. This generation was globally dispersed in places as different as the United States and Japan, but perhaps because of the singular horrors of the Second World War and as resurgent colonial wars began, they demanded a casual aesthetic that was remarkably similar and coherent. Youth wanted freer clothing than previous styles. The symbolic relaxation of form and fit was casualwear’s primary feature, coupled with comfort, often borrowed from

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sportswear. Casualwear in the form of the style and industry that coalesced in the 1960s in Japan can be defined as not only emphasizing comfort, ease of movement, simplicity of design, and minimal components, but also as a political statement against more formal clothing and by association social structures. Materials associated with casualwear included soft denim, cotton, jersey, flannel, and later artificial fleece with many elements of athletic gear where dynamic simplicity and comfort were already sanctioned. Loud colours, emblems, and logos took the role of flamboyance and theatricality from finer materials and more intricate preparation. A key element, and attraction, was the huge reduction in preparation and maintenance. Casualwear far reduced the need for washing, ironing, dressing, and matching, and indeed can be understood as a deliberate de-emphasizing of the effort invested in sartorial appearance, or in parallel with contemporary art, a new privileging of concept over craft. This also was part of the fundamental industrial change in the craft of dressmakers and tailors, as it was replaced by ready-to-wear clothes. Casualwear can also be read as a moral judgement of 1950s formality and a rejection of its built-in hierarchies, with a corresponding desire to replace those sartorial orders with something more democratic and egalitarian. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century avant-gardism, from the Rational Dress Movement to the Bauhaus, linked a political agenda with an aesthetic one using anti-ornamentalism to represent progressive thought. In the same way, casualwear was used to represent the association of formality in fashion with artificiality: out of step with the changing ideologies of the post-war era. Further, like the logic of an ideal scholar’s dress, a dishevelled appearance was meant to symbolize a mind on higher things: in this case the generational imperatives of freedom, equality, and pleasure rather than a life governed by nationalism, war, discipline, and respectability. The evolution towards the dominance of casualwear will be addressed in this chapter first by looking at the developments in fashion in the early twentieth century, particularly the turning of attention to the street and the accelerating cult of youth. It will use the idea of post-war America as a state of mind to look at the

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sartorial dreams America came to represent in this new world, post-war order and the global demographic bubble of the baby boomers who aspired to them. Essential to this is the explosion of fashion information available to young people and the greater fashion literacy it enabled. Fashion being something mostly abstract was exponentially expanded by film and magazine cultures of the twentieth century.2 There was a social strategy of reversal that occurred in the 1960s when youth became the focal point of fashion, and invention and creativity were emphasized over symbols of wealth and respectability. The new model customer ceased to be a wealthy housewife and became her rebellious daughter; younger, freer, and less linked to established class rules. This was a global phenomenon advocating for the primacy of youth. In Japan it can be seen in the beginnings of cute fashion, the cutequake, while in Britain, Diana Vreeland labelled it the ‘Youthquake’.3 The demographic bubble of the baby boomers (1946–64), postwar economic growth with wealth enough for cultures of pocket money, and an explosion of available fashion media allowed for the invention of a new stage of life between childhood and adulthood. It became the most desirable place to be: the Goldilocks age, not too young, not too old. Industrial changes too are the backdrop to casualwear as the limited sizing of mass production needed casual styles that would allow people to abandon their tailors, dressmakers, and home sewing machines. Ready-to-wear became the centre of the fashion industry after the war and its efficiency necessitated greater simplicity of design. While this is far from being a truly decolonial work of fashion theory or even a truly global reading of fashion, this chapter attempts a deliberate foregrounding of the Japanese developments towards casualwear, as a way of destabilizing the usual Eurocentric accounts that all fashion begins in Europe or America and it attempts to upset centre–periphery, metropole–colony assumptions. Even as the Japanese believed they were following America, what was actually aspired to was the ideal of America: America as a state of mind. Casualwear became the uniform of 2

3

For more on youth, race, and street style prior to the 1950s, see Chapter 23 by Vivienne Richmond in this volume. Diana Vreeland, ‘Youthquake’, Vogue, 1 January 1965, 112.

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youth everywhere, not because America had become a global hegemon, but because of the obvious metaphor of freer clothing representing a freer life, an idea that became possible in the post-war era.

pre-casualwear: the long triumph of bohemianism Richard Martin and Harold Koda, in a landmark exhibition called ‘Infra-Apparel’ held in 1993 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, advanced a generational model of fashion that emphasized the visualization of progress on the body via continual simplification.4 Since French Queen Marie Antoinette’s (1755– 1793) innovations and the fashions of the ancien régime, Martin and Koda argued that every generation’s underwear became the next generation’s outerwear. It became known as the onion theory of fashion: ‘clothing has sought to convey elements of boudoir privacy to the public domain’.5 Each iteration intended to signal how a new generation was renewing itself by the relaxation of the formality of the previous one. Marie Antoinette herself was famous for leading elite fashions of increasing casualization, with forms of clothing previously used only in intimate settings being used in more and more public ones.6 The implication of this process is that eventually there can be no more simplification, and the most simplified garments possible, white t-shirts perhaps, become acceptable outerwear. While this did not happen until after the Second World War, Martin and Koda would argue that a process of casualization had begun centuries earlier. If, as Martin and Koda argued, ‘clothing is the principal means by which we negotiate between private and public realms’,7 and further that there was an overarching tendency in modernity of increasing casualization of clothing, then this is reflective of 4

5 6

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Richard Martin and Harold Koda, Infra-Apparel (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993). Ibid., 10. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Picador, 2007). Martin and Koda, Infra-Apparel, 10.

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a breakdown of the division between public and private realms. Adolf Loos (1870–1933) described a moral dimension to this in his famous dictum that ‘ornament is a crime’.8 Loos was defining an aesthetic of modernity where any form hiding its intrinsic function was dishonest; pretending to be something it was not. Loos was something of a dandy himself and his thinking was focused mainly on the architecture of lavish late nineteenth-century Vienna, but the central idea remains a key precursor of casualwear: that formality and ornamentation disguise malevolent intent. A further political dimension, expressed by Frankfurt School sociologist Ingrid Brenninkmeyer (1932–2004), was that the more democratic life becomes, the less elaborate ornaments are likely to be.9 Increasing casualness and the removal of formal elements equated to a new political order, based on increasing democratic equality. Aristocratic hierarchies and their sartorial expressions were something the early twentieth century imagined would be abolished long before casualwear really fulfilled this prediction in the postwar era. The separation of the public and the private as administered in clothing, and the belief that this is a mechanism for maintaining arbitrary social structures, is still an unresolved tension today as social media continues the collision between public and private domains (Figure 39.1). The functionalism, that Loos raised to a moral imperative, was another premise of casualwear predicted long before sneakers could be worn outside of sports fields. Martin and Koda observed that ‘function and finery meet with oppositional intensity in underwear and lingerie’ even as underwear continued to become outerwear.10 This is because at stake here is the question of the very reason for clothing; the very function clothes were supposed to be fulfilling. For the generation adopting casualwear the answer is that the function is comfort, although casualwear itself can be as complicated, expensive, and obsessed with appearance as more formal ensembles. The ‘oppositional intensity’ is in operation even though the function pretends to dominate the finery. The 8

9 10

Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Thoughts on Design and Materials (London: Penguin Books, 2019). Ingrid Brenninkmeyer, The Sociology of Fashion (Paris: Sirey, 1962). Martin and Koda, Infra-Apparel, 10.

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Figure 39.1 Ginza, Tokyo, 28 March 1969. See-through fashions in minidresses and siren-suits use the implication of intimacy, comfort, and informality to emphasize and deliberately demarcate youthfulness. Photo by Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images.

raison d’être was to appear that comfort was the function, thus diminishing clothing’s other roles as signifiers of class and hierarchy. Casualwear, as a style consisting of ready-to-wear commodities and deliberate signifiers of individual identity, would become possible only with the growth of ready-to-wear scale industry and ideologies of individualism.11 For Japan these two things significantly increased after the First World War. Japan had become 11

See the chapters by Veronique Pouillard (Chapter 35), Reggie Blaszczyk (Chapter 36), and Simona Segre Reinach (Chapter 38) in this volume.

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wealthy using its industrial production to grow into many new markets as European industry focused on the war from 1914. This allowed far greater personal consumption of fashion and the emergence of mobo and moga, the modern boys and girls, that represented a new fashionable society in the 1920s, as the flapper age did in Europe and America.12 A morality of individualism expanded too, in a country previously bound tightly in family and group obligations. Only with such a fundamental social change underway could as much be devoted to fashion and self-styling. Kon Wajiro¯ (1888–1973), an architect and ethnographer chronicling early twentieth-century Tokyo, observed an emerging world of consumption and identity adjustment on the streets and in the act of shopping.13 Kon saw that a new modern subjectivity was being enacted in minute changes in behaviour, self-presentation, needs, and identities performed via fashion and consumption. Kon’s studies were conducted in the early 1920s and intensified after the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923, the devastation of which in Tokyo both required vast renewal of physical clothing and allowed new subject positioning.14 The fundamental changes to social values are similar to those observed later in the 1920s in the work of Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk or Arcades Project – started around 1927 but not published until after his death in 1940 – about the nineteenth-century arcades of Paris and the birth of the flâneur, flâneuse, and flâneurism, of a new lived spectacle of promenading, shopping, and fashion.15 A new mode of life was being observed and entirely new urban characters emerged to live these lives. These characters, the flâneurs and flâneuses, then later the modern boys and modern girls, and the flappers, while distinct styles and groups in themselves, all became in their

12

13

14

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Chiaki Ajioka and Jackie Menzies, Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art 1910–1935 (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998). Jilly Traganou and Izumi Kuroishi, Design and Disaster: Kon Wajiro¯’s Modernologio (New York: Parsons the New School, 2014). Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 18. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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respective ages emblematic archetypes of urban, modern experience, based in the street and in fashionable behaviour. These new forms of life foreshadow, in many of their preoccupations, the casualwear of the 1960s: the emphasis on movement in the cut of the clothes, the spectacular comfort compared to what was worn immediately before, the fierce generational differentiation, the casual treatment of sex and the flouting of sexual norms both actual and signalled in clothing, the close association between the fashion and music of the time and, most important in all of these, the social strategy of cool, of composure and self-control, ironic detachment from social norms preferring an autonomous value system deliberately separated from the mainstream which it does not take seriously. However, these fashionable archetypes and the social changes they wished to engender were all prematurely ended. The flapper age, with new clothes, lifestyles, and freedoms claimed by women was ended by the stock-market crash of 1929.16 In the Great Depression that followed, sartorial experimentation and any appearance of decadent hedonism were less acceptable. The mobo and moga disappeared with Japan’s descent into fascism where individualism and experimental fashion were branded as foreign corruptions.17 Flâneurism, according to Benjamin, met its demise with the triumph of consumer capitalism; that which had made it possible eventually suffocating it; the initial subjectivity it allowed, eventually overwhelmed by mass-marketing. The possibility of casualwear, as a sartorial metaphor for freedom, did not reappear full blown until the 1960s.

america as a state of mind While the precursors for a change in fashion as fundamental as the emergence of casualwear are long and extend back into the early modern period, the more immediate ones came after the Second 16

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Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani Barlow (eds.), The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

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World War. The end of the war marked the beginning of late capitalism, with the Marshall Plan in Europe, the occupation of Japan, and the Bretton Woods agreement remaking global industries.18 In the countries falling under a new American hegemony, especially those rebuilding in Western Europe and Japan, there was a huge expansion in the fluidity of financial capital, with enlarged multinational corporations driving corresponding growth of industrialization and commodification. Naturally this included the fashion industry, and with an all-pervasive logic to commodify everything: youth and even detachment and subcultural resistance became things which could be bought and sold. American interwar teenage culture had established youth as a market particularly through film and sport, marking out a pattern of profiting from generational distinction that would be repeated in fashion.19 Furthermore, a generation of demobbed soldiers across the world, trained in wartime logistics, and having experienced wartime cosmopolitanism brought new perspectives to the fashion business. They brought their newly acquired skills to the new age of multinational capitalism and globalizing popular culture. The global cultural influence of victorious America cannot be underestimated, especially for the generation that grew up in the 1950s and came of age in the 1960s. It marked a new era when fashion would be inspired by pop culture and the space age rather than bourgeois salons. And although it seemed something of a paradox, America represented the commodification of casualness, a cool aesthetic that was ignoring and transcending the empires and old orders that had come before. America, in the eyes of the rest of the world, presented something of an ambition of freedom, sex appeal, and opportunity rather than an actual place of racial tension and Cold War paranoia. For fashion, post-war America was a state of mind because it was known by the world mainly through the lens of Hollywood, where any of the problems with the American experiment were obscured behind beautiful people and the intimate access to them the camera gave. This intimacy too was part of the pull towards casualwear as it redefined 18 19

Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975). Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875–1945 (London: Pimlico, 2007).

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glamour from the middle-class suits of Cary Grant to the workingclass t-shirts and leather jackets of James Dean.20 Tamae Ejima, editor from 1965 to 1973 of the influential Soen fashion magazine (est. 1936), recalls how Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina (1954) and Funny Face (1957) directly influenced the magazine to use younger models, prioritizing ‘funny-faced’ youth over established beauty.21 To suit this new younger pivot, designers like Yoko Kawasawa radically simplified dresses and Yasuji Hanamori’s straight sewing designs were featured to promote an editorial concept that was younger, freer, and more casual and playful. While America’s appeal was partly the direct fashions of Hollywood, what America really seemed to represent was the freedom to wear anything you wanted, breaking the confines of the formality of the past. By any measure, post-Second World War Americanism was about youth. It was the inspiration for fashion’s great reversal in the 1960s where mothers started to want to look like their daughters rather than the other way around. Gilles Lipovetsky characterized this as an accelerating cult of youth.22 For Lipovetsky, modernity was the dominance of the logic of a ‘fashion mod’ by which cultures became organized around a cult of novelty, consumerism, and individualism. Lipovetsky saw this as a long Western historical process stretching from the late middle ages with a gradual increase over time in individualism and subjectivity. Although Lipovetsky’s work is problematically Eurocentric, the link between individual subjectivity and fashion culture remains an interesting way to read the political undercurrents in the fashions of the 1960s. Fashion in Lipovetsky’s reading is not just Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption or Pierre Bourdieu’s social distinction but a domain of personal self-actualization which draws people away from obscurantism and fanaticism.23 The modern fashion system is basically, 20 21

22

23

See Chapter 26 by Stella Bruzzi in this volume. Mariko Nishitani, ‘Fashion Stories of the 1960s: A Look at Soen (1965–73) under Tamae Ejima’, in Fashion in Japan 1945–2020 (Tokyo: National Art Center Tokyo, 2021), 45–50. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Modern Library, 2001); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).

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for Lipovetsky, the very foundation of modern Western democracy, not only via fashion-inspired novelty and constant experiment, but also via fashion-taught scepticism and mature judgement. A fashion culture holds that even radically antithetical viewpoints no longer give rise to inhibiting exclusions: social divisions are not intolerable as they are under totalitarianisms, they function like fashion, in a non-dramatic mode of accepted marginal differences. And like fashion they are non-permanent; every idea, political or sartorial, can be overturned in the next election or season anyway. No matter the degree to which Lipovetsky’s argument, extreme as it is, can be accepted – that fashion is the foundation of democracy, to the exclusion of all other contributions – the structure of judgements in material culture and the way fashion foregrounds individual subjectivity undoubtedly plays at least a part. Although crucial for democracy, Lipovetsky also argued that the individualism fostered by fashion led to a narcissism detrimental to the individual: an enlightened democratic society and personal happiness are not always correlated. A fashionable life and the endless questioning and overturning it involves is not one of lasting satisfaction and can lead to existential anguish and a ‘malaise in living’.24 Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans argued an even closer link between the scientific method as a key element of the Enlightenment and modernity and the processes of fashion in that they both require an endless questioning of assumptions; aesthetic and scientific. They argued also that this created the modern world but at the same time leads to instability and anxiety.25 Human agency and the seductive power of material goods which might inhibit that agency are central issues in consumer societies and the question between freedom and external control is a central issue of fashion. The ideal of America was thus a representation of democratic freedom in the form of a youth-focused, casual, fashion. Casualwear could not provide freedom in and of itself, but it was a clear way of attempting to enact it. And one of the freedoms most strongly demanded, and thus enacted in clothing, was from the social regulation of sex. 24 25

Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, 241. Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans, Fashion and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

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Sex was obviously a large part of America’s appeal. Although every generation thinks they have discovered sex, and as early as 1913 the St Louis Mirror announced, ‘It’s sex o’clock in America; a wave of sex hysteria and sex discussion seem to have invaded this country’, it was in post-war imagery and consumer goods that this branding really became global.26 Again America’s association with youth and sex may or may not have been a true representation of a more complicated internal sexual politics, but the image sold in post-war American popular culture, from pin-up girls, to Hollywood, to rock and roll, was sex appeal. America did not have a monopoly on it, of course, but certainly it aspired to a commanding interest aided by its unprecedented and unrivalled soft power. It is a somewhat easy association, from an ideology of freedom, to an ideology of sexual freedom and then to a representation of sexual freedom in clothing. Casualwear and a more casual attitude to sex were an obvious correlative, although the actual politics were far more complicated and locally specific. The charge of being repressed was a common one in the 1960s and an essential critique of societal norms of the sexual revolution. Individualism and freedom extended to the body meant that the erotic should be celebrated and enjoyed and not repressed by family, industrialized sexual morality (focused only on the efficient output of children as future workforce), religion or the state and that there should be acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual monogamous relationships and the normalization of contraception, nudity, pornography, and alternate sexualities. This had clear implications for clothing in the way dress might represent and enact sexual, social, and political repression. In this vein, psychologist J. C. Flügel (1884–1955) argued compellingly for a correlation in Western societies between a desire for tight controlling and formal garments and political conservatism.27 Flügel’s theories were based on the Freudian partition of personality, and the idea that a superego, the inhibitory and controlling mechanism of personality, could be overdeveloped as a result of childhood trauma around controlling the body. For Flügel, fashion was the 26 27

‘Sex O’Clock in America’, St Louis Mirror, 15 March 1913. John Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930).

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result of an unresolved dialectic of self-assertion and submission. These are played out in clothing in the twin desires for bodily display and bodily modesty. Flügel argued that an overdeveloped superego, or moral unconscious, desires a harsh and strictly enforced moral code, a stress upon tradition, and unquestioning obedience to external and internal authority. The desire for tight and controlling clothes, therefore, was linked to the same cause as the desire for a strong leader, and indeed for totalitarianism. Flügel was writing in the 1930s and clearly his gaze was on the nascent fascist movements in Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, and Spain, and how they were presenting themselves sartorially.28 The tight uniforms and exacting symbolic details suggested to Flügel overactive superegos. In a preference for uniforms, the regimes and their leaders were rejecting the creative novelty and freedom of fashion that Lipovetsky claimed as a democratic foundation stone. In such an understanding, soft or loose clothing would suggest moral weakness; firmness of character and firmness of garment were understood as intimately connected. For Flügel, clothing and politics are not just linked but they also share a psychological origin. And totalitarian societies were a result of a psychological need to enforce a strict moral code on the self and others and a right to judge, disapprove of, and regulate others, especially their bodily behaviour and discipline enacted in clothing. If read through Flügel’s theoretical lens, the appearance of casualwear in the 1960s can be read as the opposite, a desire for looser, less controlling clothes and the associated sexual freedom, part of a new looser moral code regulating desire. The release of the contraceptive pill in 1960 in the United States was seen as a key scientific affirmation of an ideology of freedom. It gave women unprecedented control over their fertility and allowed long-term educational and career plans without sacrificing sexual relationships. This was not, of course, without engendering a more adversarial cultural conflict about the proper place of sexual pleasure. Signalling a position in that culture war was clearly important and clothing was the most obvious way to do this. George Taylor’s 28

Michael Carter, ‘J. C. Flügel and the Nude Future’, in Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 97–120.

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theory of a correlation between skirt hemlines and economic conditions is essentially about a propensity for risk in fashionable sexual display.29 For Taylor good economic conditions increase confidence not just in terms of spending and riskier investment but also in terms of fashion risks. As well as the buoyant economic times of the early 1960s the reduced risk of sexual activity itself carried over to the reduced risk of sexier clothing. If sex was to be possibly free of dangerous consequences a more playful attitude to the element of sexual display in clothing was possible. Michael Carter argues that the abandoning of a notion of respectability was central to the social and sartorial changes of the 1960s.30 In post-war northern England, Carter observes a very clear connection between leaving the house without hat and gloves and the seemingly much more significant notion of being a ‘respectable’ woman. The tiniest lapse of formality and etiquette was, for an earlier generation, so intimately linked with sexual propriety such as to be a central element of identity. Carter frames this judgemental inclination as the last stand of identities centred around religion and the working-class sacrifices of the war: the pride of working people keeping up appearances with very little economic means. He argues the austerity of post-war rationing into the 1950s led to the prolonging of the English attachment to the idea of ‘respectability’ and respectable dress. Religious communities, in this case non-conformist congregations of northern England, stood in strident opposition to the liberation theology that surrounded much of the provocative casualwear of the 1960s. Carter is highly critical of the misery and the stunted imaginations that were so often the requirement of this respectability and of the very fervently believed causal relationship between casual clothing and moral downfall. Carter talks of how

29

30

The hemline index theory is often attributed to George Taylor of the Wharton School of Business in 1926; however, no hemline theory is directly proposed in his work. Taylor’s Significant Post-War Changes in the FullFashioned Hosiery Industry (1929) identified skirt length as one factor that led to explosive growth in the hosiery industry during the 1920s. Michael Carter, ‘Hand in Glove: Respectability and Dress’ (2020), http://mi chaelcarter.artology.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Hand-in-GloveRespectability-Dress.pdf (accessed 15 July 2021).

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ready judgement of longer hair on a man became a judgement on his sullied social worthiness. But here, like much of the post-war world, the state and its wars and religion in general were of ever decreasing importance for young people, despite the generation above insisting that a sexual order had to be maintained via clothing, grooming, and their related etiquettes. The enormous suspicion pre-war cultures had of pleasure and sex and their representation through loose clothes is only matched by how totally those values were rejected in the 1960s. The counterculture that insisted on sexual freedom had a strange ally in the burgeoning advertising industry that after the Second World War saw the potential for limitless marketing in the sexualization of everything, especially clothes.

the casual skeuomorphic Skeuomorphism, when a new feature imitates the design of an earlier technology to allow a way to understand it, can be applied – albeit with a little licence – to the innovations of casualwear. The casualness of the 1960s was first introduced with the language of suiting in Ivy styles (referencing Ivy League universities) before it extended to a style of urban adaptation of sportswear. This was particularly the pattern in Japan, where America truly was a state of mind as magazines and films perpetuated an image quite removed from actual America. The United States’ military had occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952 with more than a million Allied soldiers deployed over that time bringing jazz, a liberal constitution, and even specially commissioned films encouraging Japanese to hold hands and kiss in public.31 Before that, a long relationship of admiration and rivalry, cultural and political, stretched back to the forced reopening of Japan by the United States’ Navy in 1853. Considering how far back this admiration began, there is an argument that in fact in its attempts to copy an American casualwear style Japan invented the real thing or at least a purer form. Like the Arabians safeguarding the classics of Plato 31

Kitamura Hiroshi, Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

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and Aristotle during the Dark Ages, Japan had been the safe-haven of the essence of American casualwear.32 Starting with the relaxed Ivy League student outfits, then jeans, hippie gear, West Coast sportwear, 1950s retro, New York streetwear and vintage workwear, and directly imitated Hollywood film outfits, Japan seemed to create more complete versions, in an overarching desire to approach America’s more casual, lifestyle grounded fashions, both of clothing and of living. Perhaps there is an argument here, following Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), that only in imitation does a style emerge, or perhaps here that American style was more an ambition than an actual thing.33 Japan enthusiastically embraced a multitude of American casual styles throughout the 1960s. The button-down shirts of Ivy styles were among the first, especially after 1964 when it featured in the uniform adopted at the Olympics, propelling it into mainstream acceptability. Denim jeans were popular on the black market during the occupation but after the reorganization of the cotton mills in Kojima from the early 1960s jeans began to be made in Japan, and sold from 1965.34 In photographs of the student demonstrations of 1969 everyone is wearing them. Also in the mid-1960s the Souvenir jacket, or sukajan, a rayon satin version of an American letterman baseball jacket, heavily and symbolically embroidered, became mainstream, especially after being worn by the main character in the 1961 film Buta to Gunkan (Pigs and Battleships).35 By 1967 the fu¯ten-zoku or vagabond tribe had emerged as a subculture around Shinjuku station and adopted hippie-styling.36 While there were some Americans still in Japan most of these trends of American casualwear were in imitation of other Japanese and of Japanese magazines, decoupled from their supposed origins. This is repeated in many places around the world in multiple forms of 32

33 34 35

36

W. David Marx, Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (New York: Basic Books, 2015), xiii. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (London: Penguin Classics, 1966). Marx, Ametora, 82. Elizabeth Kramer, ‘New Vintage – New History? The Sukajan (Souvenir Jacket) and Its Fashionable Reproduction’, International Journal of Fashion Studies, 7/1 (2020), 25–47. Koji Namba, ‘Lost “Tribes” of Postwar Japan: Reflections from the 21st Century’, in Fashion in Japan 1945–2020.

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Figure 39.2 The Miyuki-zoku (Miyuki tribe) gathered around Miyuki street in Ginza, Tokyo, sporting Ivy styles, 28 August 1966. Alamy Image ID: JP1HTK.

‘coca-colonization’.37 But crucially this was not simply cultural imposition, but a more nuanced way culture globalized, with American inspiration but with profound new local layers of meaning and forms. It could even be interpreted that American casual was a deliberate retreat from fashion, attempting to de-emphasize clothing, and that the absence of style had been interpreted as style; anti-fashion turned into fashion (Figure 39.2). W. David Marx has argued that Ivy styles in Japan were pushed by a small group of fashion leaders, particularly Kensuke Ishizu, a fashion pioneer who established the brand VAN in 1954 and who was also a critical editorial presence in the men’s fashion magazine Otoko no Fukushoku (Men’s Clothing), also established in 1954 which used the English title Men’s Club from 1956.38 Men’s Club imagined America as a state of mind: a world where everyone lived 37

38

Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Marx, Ametora, 17.

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surrounded by Ivy suits, Coca-Cola bottles, and jazz records, and VAN was ready to provide the outfit you needed for that vision. Very close cooperation between the publishing industry and the industry it documents has a long history in Japan, and an ideal of editorial independence has been historically less important to readers. From the industry perspective, following the premise that fashion is led by media and garment producers, Marx tells a compelling narrative of careful collaboration between the fashion press, brands, and textile producers to create the youth market segment and then the prevailing style for it, beginning in the mid1950s and becoming mainstream by 1964. And the preppy Ivy style was the masterplan, a gateway to casualwear. Ivy was based mainly in relaxed forms of suiting, but this was the skeuomorphic element; the essence of a casual approach to clothing was entirely different, even though some of the details seemed initially familiar.39 The Japanese post-war obsession with America stemmed from the idea that the United States was a land of unbelievable riches and technology, but Ivy League campuses and style represented veneration for tradition and classics rather than trend chasing. Ivy had the air of old money to it, both in American and Japanese contexts. Wearing items until they disintegrated signalled not their frugality but their classicism. In Japan there had been an early twentieth-century style of hei’i habo¯ (lit. shabby clothes and an old hat) where elite students flaunted their prestige through shabby uniforms, signalling a rakish confidence of superior style, just as neogothic university buildings, draughty, cold, and crumbling were the pride of old-money campuses. Ivy style elements – slim suits with three buttons, jackets hung straight without darts, trousers with a buckled strap at the back, button-down collars on dress shirts – were all judged by the self-appointed arbiters at Men’s Club as either honmono (the real things), or nisemono (an imitation), even though the arbiter of what constituted the style was a Japanese vision of America, not America itself. The sporty alterations, reminiscent of early English suits, designed for life on 39

Masafumi Monden, ‘Ivy in Japan: A Regalia of Non-Conformity and Privilege’, in Patricia Mears (ed.), Ivy Style: Radical Conformists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 174–85.

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horses in the country, were a foreshadowing of the coming sportswear revolution, that continues up to the athleisure styles of our own time. The irony is that the Men’s Club editorial board had no real experience of American campuses and when they did make an actual trip at great expense in May 1965, they experienced something of a crisis, finding almost none of the style they had been so fervently promoting. In the photo essay Take Ivy they published after the trip, while expecting Harvard students to appear in threebutton jackets, Ivy strap trousers, Oxford button-down collared shirts, regimental ties, and wingtips, they actually encountered students in frayed cut-off shorts and flip flops.40 Furthermore, when interviewed, American students seemed to have put almost no effort into their fashions. Trying to turn disappointment into spin they concluded that American campus style was unconscious; they demonstrated status through nonchalance. But this was the essence of cool and casualwear; appearing not to care. The print media and the associated fashion information it propagated aimed at creating a differentiated youth market for fashion. Another magazine, Heibon Punch, launched in 1964, added fashion to the editorial mix of politics, sex, trends, and cartoons.41 Its target readership was youth focused, but also encouraged salarymen to keep up a lifestyle of leisure, creating an aspirational youth segment as well as an actual youth segment. To demonstrate the enormous influence of the print media and fashion literacy of Japanese consumers, the launch issue of Heibon Punch sold 600,000 copies, and within two years had a circulation of a million. The Japanese population in 1966 was a little under 100 million. Heibon Punch was able to introduce all Japanese men to the new relaxed Ivy style. Demographically the first wave of Japanese baby boomers entered university right as it launched and right as the economic miracle was taking off, creating the perfect storm for casualwear.

40

41

Teruyoshi Hayashida, Toshiyuki Kurosu, and Hajime Hasegawa, Take Ivy (New York: Power House, 2010). Heibon Punch no Jidai [The Era of Heibon Punch] (Tokyo: Magazine House, 1996).

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The illustrator Kazuo Hozumi’s (b. 1930) Ivy boy illustrations also became a universal symbol of the style in the same way as John Held Jr’s (1889–1958) flapper illustrations captured the essence of the look far better than any single outfit. Just as Held’s 1920s illustrations in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life magazine as well as book covers for F. Scott Fitzgerald became emblematic of jazz age fashions, dances, and attitudes, so too Kazuo’s illustrations of Ivy boys in the 1960s captured an embodiment of the fashion better than photographic examples.42 As such they achieved nearly hieroglyphic resonance among the 1960s generation and how casualwear should be read. Japanese Ivy style was highly didactic, since unlike in the United States where it drew from tradition and class privilege and the subtle class distinction of dressing down, in Japan all this needed to be imparted by magazines and brands as the authentic thing. There is a certain irony in a rules-based casualwear: whereas the essence of what was being strived for was an unconscious cool, Japan’s casualwear was a very conscious cool, with ever greater tyranny of details. Marx argues this was essential to draw men back into fashionable consumption and behaviour.43 While American masculinity could approach casualwear via the subterfuge of cool and pretending not to care about clothing, thus it being more casual, Japanese masculinity could focus on knowledge of details and rules, making fashion, previously a feminine pursuit something more akin to technical masculine enthusiasms like sport and cars. Magazines like Men’s Club and Heibon Punch allowed fashion knowledge to be an element of individual style and provided the confidence and motivation for men to leave their tailors and more socially mediated clothing consumption.44

42

43 44

Shelley Armitage, John Held, Jr.: Illustrator of the Jazz Age (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987). Marx, Ametora, 40. Miki Nammoku, ‘Japanese Ready-to-Wear Clothing of the 1950s’, in Fashion in Japan 1945–2020; Isamu Mitsuzono, ‘Mail-Order Retailing in Pre-War Japan: A Pathway of Consumption before the Emergence of the Mass Market’, in Penny Francks and Janet Hunter (eds.), The Historical Consumer: Consumption and Everyday Life in Japan 1850–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 259–83.

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Women had started to wear brightly coloured print dresses shaped by international styles from the 1950s, often made themselves as part of the sewing machine boom in Japan. Andrew Gordon has shown that Japanese women had taken to sewing machines on a globally unprecedented scale after the war as a form of self-reliance and aspiration for sartorial renewal.45 By 1960 sewing machines in Japan reached a diffusion rate of 72 per cent of households, second only among consumer durables to the radio. Such a high sewing literacy allowed women to imagine a new fashion aesthetic for themselves before many had the resources to afford ready-to-wear. While this was not the casualwear of the 1960s, this homemade independence allowed women to change and make much simpler and more casual clothes, at the same time relegating the kimono to formal occasions, although it would not be until the 1970s that Japanese women adopted jeans, as their university participation rate climbed from 17 per cent in 1970 to 33 per cent in 1980.46 A key element of casualwear was as an industrial convenience: to convince men and women to leave their tailors and dressmakers and adopt styles that came in limited standard sizing required by ready-to-wear production. Thus, the promotion of casualwear was to fit the consumer to the needs of new industry rather than industry providing a look that perfectly fit the consumer’s needs for freedom and casualness. The relaxed jackets and trousers of Ivy, then the chino trousers, navy blazers, seersucker, soft cotton sweatshirts, denim jeans, and sneakers, were all increasingly appropriate to non-tailored mass production. In 1957 semi-tailormade clothes accounted for 44.7 per cent of all department store sales in Japan; but only four years later in 1961 ready-to-wear overtook it to become the largest category indicating a very rapid overturning of industrial focus.47 It is hard not to see the echoes of wartime standardization, logistics, and efficient supply chains in the new industrial models for clothing. 45

46

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Andrew Gordon, Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow, ‘Women’s Participation in Higher Education in Japan’, Comparative Education Review, 29/4 (1985), 471–89. Nammoku, ‘Japanese Ready-to-Wear Clothing of the 1950s’, 279.

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In Europe, the Marshall Plan (1948–51) had rebuilt the fashion industry of Italy with textile production dreamed of, but never realized, under fascism. The immediate post-war period was a golden age for haute couture in France, but the term became more and more abstract as fashion houses functioned less as tailors for the wealthy and more as style leaders for the fashion industry. This too can be read as skeuomorphic; a fundamental change in industrial structure at first imitating past glories before it creates new forms. Ready-to-wear became the heart of fashion even as it initially benefited haute couture by taking it to a wider audience. Most fashion houses were faced with a problem of a divergent agenda; trying to uphold an image of bourgeois salon luxury and oldworld style while also seeing that fashion was tilting towards youth, simplicity, concept over finery, and casualness, inspired by popular culture, the space age, and the streets. Partly this could be answered by empowering youth to serve youth as Dior did by employing the twenty-one-year-old Yves Saint-Laurent as head designer in 1957. Saint-Laurent produced a vastly more casual beatnik style collection in 1958. A decade later in 1967 Saint-Laurent opened a prêt-à-porter house acknowledging the global shift from haute couture to ready-to -wear. Alicia Drake has argued this was because of Saint-Laurent’s desire to democratize fashion, but it was also surely part of the pull towards new industrial imperatives and an increasing consumer desire for more casual clothes.48 The reversal of production modes initially enabled the imitation of the glories of haute couture to be simulated on a large scale but went on to change the fundamentals of fashion style as well.

Cutequake The editor-in-chief of British Vogue in the 1960s, Diana Vreeland, used the term ‘Youthquake’ to describe how fashion of the time was changing in unprecedented ways.49 For the first time, a generation was not looking up to fashion leaders, such as the celebrities, royalty, or great designers but were instead looking 48

49

Alicia Drake, The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007). Vreeland, ‘Youthquake’, 112.

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Figure 39.3 Students protesting, 19 November 1971. Showing the rapidly changing identities and fashions of Japanese university students among protesters against the conditions, particularly continued American military presence, of the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty. Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images.

down to the street. Casual was trumping formal. Young performers, like The Beatles (1960–70) and The Rolling Stones (formed in 1962) dominated popular music, and this also influenced fashion in new ways. Vreeland promoted this youth-based aesthetic of miniskirts, sneakers, jumpsuits, and loud colours and she booked young models like Twiggy and Veruschka and featured designers like Mary Quant and Betsey Johnson. It was a generation defining themselves against their parents and their fashion intended to repudiate the formal fashions and social structures of the 1950s with casualness and freedom. It was labelled ‘bubble-up’ fashion as the polarity had reversed from top-down, or trickle-down models of influence.50 The generational desire for freedom was sartorially expressed but also evident in very active protest movements and in popular music (Figure 39.3). 50

Paul Blumberg, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Status Symbol: Some Thoughts on Status in a Post-Industrial Society’, Social Problems, 21/4 (1974), 480–98.

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Other places experienced this reversal of fashion values too, but often in localized forms. The Tokyo Olympics of 1964 was symbolic of the spectacular Japanese economic recovery from the war, but with wealth and reconstruction came various social tensions between a rebellious younger generation brought up in peace and prosperity and an older generation keen to protect the values of a traditional society and a work ethic that stood in for a militarylevel sacrifice. Huge student riots in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s revolved around a generational resistance to this patriarchal, hierarchical social structure, just as anti-Vietnam War movements did in other countries.51 In 1968, protest and resistance on Japanese university campuses was seen as effective, and even cool, an identity based on resistance to the values of the past. Although complicated and involving many different groups with different agendas a distinguishing feature of the protest agenda was an antipathy towards existing institutions and ideas governing Japanese society. The subtle casualness of Ivy suits and blazers was not going to be enough to communicate that antipathy. Hippies and lefties created the first market for jeans in Japan, as only a few years after the Olympics, student demonstrations threatened to derail the hard-won economics-led agenda. For various reasons, however, the student movement collapsed in 1970 but a counterculture, made up of multiple subcultures, had been born. A key aesthetic born at that moment was that of cute or kawaii. It was actually because of the failure of student protests, the inevitability of social and economic structures, and surrender to materialism and popular culture that the modern form of kawaii emerged in fashion. However, it emerged not as an acquiescence to the socio-cultural mainstream but as an ironic form of disassociation and resistance. It was a deliberately childish fashion that intentionally undermined the seriousness of dominant cultural values such as maturity and social obligation. It hides a political assertion of independence by pretending to be completely non-political using ironic detachment as a new social strategy where protests and riots had failed. The casualness of cute was clear, as it 51

Takazawa Koji, Rekishi to Shite no Shinsayoku [The New Left as History] (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1996); Gavan McCormack, ‘The Student Left in Japan’, New Left Review, 1/65 (1971), 37–53.

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Figure 39.4 An ever-increasing Japanese obsession with cuteness and youth: English model Twiggy visits Japan. Getty Images.

deliberately undermined formality and seriousness and via an aesthetic subterfuge sought freedom from the judgements of a nolonger respected adult world (Figure 39.4).52

the goldilocks age Philippe Ariès argued that childhood is a relatively new concept emerging in the seventeenth century and that thus in medieval 52

Toby Slade, ‘Cute Fashion: The Social Strategies and Aesthetics of Kawaii’, in Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade (eds.), Introducing Japanese Popular Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 399–411.

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society the very idea of childhood did not exist.53 Ariès was not arguing that there were no children, but that childhood was less recognized and valued as a distinct phase of human life. There was, Ariès argued, much less separation between adults and children in medieval society. Ariès’ larger point was that childhood and forms of family life are not natural categories but socially constructed. Certainly, in terms of clothing this was true, with children in some cultures dressed like smaller adults in most cultures until the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, and only limited forms of childspecific clothing until then when it became an entire genre of clothing.54 In the twentieth century, a further distinction in terms of sartorial stages of life was conceptualized, and later marketed, creating the category of behaviours as well as dress of youth. Youth was a stage that was after childhood but before marriage and the post-war baby boomers were the first generation to experience this en masse for a number of reasons both social and economic. It can be called the Goldilocks age because it is conceived of as not too young to lack understanding or to be pre-sexual, and not too old as to have responsibilities or obligations such as marriage, childrearing, or careers. Crucially it had also to be an age that had access to resources. It was the Goldilocks age of freedom but also with enough money to express it sartorially. Japanese Ivy fashion pioneer Toshiyuki Kurosu (b. 1934), said that ‘In the 1950s there was no such thing as youth fashion, if you went to a department store, there was the children’s section and the gentlemen’s section, but absolutely nothing in between. Stores didn’t think they could sell anything made for youth so they didn’t even try.’55 The institution of mass tertiary education is a background factor here, as after the Second World War, participation rates at universities, vocational schools, and trade schools rose from rates of around 15 per cent, representing only the elite, to mass rates of up to 50 per cent.56 The fact that a much larger proportion of the relevant 53 54 55 56

Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (London: Pimlico, 1996). Claire Rose, Children’s Clothes since 1750 (London: Batsford, 1989). Toshiyuki Kurosu quoted in Marx, Ametora, 24. Martin Trow, ‘Reflections on the Transition from Elite to Mass to Universal Access: Forms and Phases of Higher Education in Modern Societies since WWII’, in James J. F. Forest and Philip G. Altbach (eds.), International Handbook of Higher Education (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 243–80.

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age group was spending a number of years in further study before seeking employment went towards the creation of a firmer concept of youth as an age between childhood and adulthood. And this is why styles like Ivy, which directly romanticized university life were the direct antecedents to casualwear. The sexual dimension of the 1960s is another key element with social norms radically changing and technological advances allowing unprecedented control of fertility. Courtship in most cultures had been highly regulated, because of the risk, both physical and social, of making mistakes. The pill and other new, and newly accepted, birth control methods allowed courtship to be extended, and in a single generation the average age of marriage and of first child rose dramatically across the world. The number of unmarried Americans aged twenty to twenty-four doubled from 4.3 million in 1960 to 9.7 million in 1976.57 The pill allowed many things and particularly the period of youth, sexually active without having children, to be prolonged. The period of courtship had been turned from something fraught and risky into something a bit more casual and therefore desirable to extend. Romance was no longer so costly. Hence the need for styles that symbolized the new casualness (Figure 39.5). The question of how this generation were able to fund new clothing remains, especially for clothing that was rebelling against the values of those providing the funding for it. Parenting expert Sidonie Gruenberg (1881–1974) had popularized the concept of pocket money or an allowance from 1912, as a way to teach children how to manage money from an early age.58 Banks promoted pocket money and saving with money boxes from the 1920s to establish children as future customers. But after the Depression, the war, and the austerity of post-war recovery, it was not until later that pocket money for children became an affordable norm, and therefore things could be marketed directly to them. 57

58

United States’ Census Bureau, Decennial Censuses, 1890 to 1940 and Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements, 1947 to 2020, www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/ demo/families-and-households/ms-2.pdf (accessed 15 July 2021). Sidonie Gruenberg, Your Child Today and Tomorrow: Some Practical Counsel for Parents (Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1928).

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Figure 39.5 Go Go Hall in Tokyo, 18 September 1968. Youth, their activities and fashions, became further differentiated from older generations as in this photograph. Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images.

Consumption in Japan around 1964 with GNP growing at 13.9 per cent centred around the three sacred treasures, black-andwhite televisions, washing machines, and refrigerators.59 In the early 1960s expensive clothing was an extravagance beyond the reach of most middle-class Japanese, especially students. But fashion is often most potent as aspiration and the huge growth in fashion magazines meant fashion ambitions became central priorities. Urban growth in Japan, with urban space becoming incredibly dense actually made clothing more important than in places where homes were central to social life. It became the norm not to use apartments for socializing as they were simply too small, which meant the bulk of the population did most of their socializing in the city itself. Such a lifestyle dynamic meant that compared to cultures with greater household space, consumption on clothing

59

Gross national product (GNP) includes the gross domestic product (GDP), plus incomes earned by foreign residents.

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became more important and people used clothing, rather than homes, to compete and display status and wealth.

conclusion The birth of casualwear had many long- and short-term causes in the 1960s. Its dominance continues in fashion today with streetwear and casualwear being unrivalled simply because of the casualization of society in general. A process of deconstructing the arbitrary structures of sartorial formality had been underway since before the twentieth century, but it was the global counterculture of the 1960s, the demographic bubble behind it, prosperity enough for a youth market, coupled with the industrial changes around ready-to-wear that cemented its inevitability in Western and developed regions. There were multiple trajectories of casualization in the conceptualization and practices of clothing fashions as the ideologies, technologies, and social structures of modernity spread across the globe and were negotiated by various cultures. The doctrines of individualism and progress demanded visual expression on the bodies of modernizing populations, and the political pull of modernity away from the statics of aristocracy and formality and towards the dynamics of fluid, casual, and democratic social organizations formed a new category of clothing in the idea of casualwear. Industrialization, with the direct influence of readyto-wear, and the reduction in the need for, and need to dress for, physical labour gave birth to new forms of employment and accompanying new forms of leisure, particularly sports. Generational differentiation, and the invention of the liminal category of youth, via youthquakes and cutequakes, with their emphasis on a cool comportment and ironic detachment, represented a social strategy of distancing from generational authority rather than directly confronting it. This found its most ideal medium in clothing. In turn the economic imperatives of capitalism seized on these street fashions and turned social practices into an important segment of the fashion industry. Many of these trajectories have only been exponentially accelerated in our own time via fast fashion and social media. The current dominance of global casualwear reveals the universal and local nature of sartorial modernity itself, with

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a category such as ‘global street fashion’ representing the ubiquitous styles, identities, business models, and advertising techniques, but also the flip side of highly local and specific street looks branching off the tree of globalized modernity.

select bibliography Ajioka, Chiaki and Jackie Menzies, Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art 1910–1935 (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998). Carter, Michael, ‘Hand in Glove: Respectability and Dress’. http://mi chaelcarter.artology.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Hand-inGlove-Respectability-Dress.pdf (2020) (accessed 15 July 2021). Fashion in Japan 1945–2020 (Tokyo: National Art Center Tokyo, 2021). Flügel, John, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930). Gordon, Andrew, Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Hayashida, Teruyoshi, Toshiyuki Kurosu, and Hajime Hasegawa, Take Ivy (New York: PowerHouse, 2010). Martin, Richard and Harold Koda, Infra-Apparel (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993). Marx, W. David, Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (New York: Basic Books, 2015). Mears, David (ed.), Ivy Style: Radical Conformists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Traganou, Jilly and Izumi Kuroishi, Design and Disaster: Kon Wajiro¯’s Modernologio (New York: Parsons the New School, 2014).

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FASHION AND GLOBALIZATION The Politics of Hijab liz bucar

Specialized clothing and accessories play various roles in many religious communities. Religious leaders wear liturgical vestments in order to be easily identified as a representative of God on earth. Ordinary practitioners wear religious clothing during ceremonies as a way to sanctify the body by sartorially orienting it to the divine. Other items are meant for everyday use to communicate religious identity, create a specific social space, or work to cultivate an individual’s character. Items of religious clothing and styles of religious dress do have roots in sacred texts, beliefs, and customs, but local, regional, and global politics also influence how religious clothing is worn and viewed. For instance, a Muslim women’s headscarf, arguably the most politicized form of religious clothing in the contemporary world, is not an artefact of the early Muslim community. Both the styles and meanings of this form of religious covering have changed over time, and these changes have been especially pronounced in the contemporary time of globalization. Put differently, although a portion of Muslim women have covered their heads since the time of the Prophet, the contemporary significance of the Islamic veil, or hijab1 as it is most often called in scholarship, is a result of

1

Throughout this chapter I use the term hijab to refer to a cluster of ideas, debates, and practices about modest Muslim dress that includes the covering of at least some head hair. Hijab is probably the most popular, and certainly in British and American contexts the most common, term for Muslim women’s headscarf in the academy. The choice of this term, and the provisional definition of it, is done reluctantly since I want to resist the temptation to reduce this cluster of practices to a singular.

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more recent political history. It is thus a good case study for the thinking through of how globalization affects the interaction of religion and fashion, as well as how everyday religious sartorial practices are implicated in broader political historical trends. This chapter will describe important political contexts from the last 150 years that have contributed to the current Muslim practices of hijab as well as non-Muslim associations with this sartorial practice. I begin with an overview of the religious meanings of the hijab, in order to demonstrate their historic malleability. Next, I consider three historical moments that affected the meaning of Muslim women’s headgear: the colonialization of Muslimmajority regions by European empires, the process of nationbuilding in Muslim-majority states, and the rise of identity politics in countries where Muslims are a religious minority. Finally, I suggest areas of fruitful future research including the politics of men’s religious clothing, the ways local politics affects modest fashion, and the emerging symbolic use of hijab in contemporary progressive politics.

religious meanings of hijab Most Muslim women who wear hijab claim they are following guidance in the Qur’ā n. However, the text alone is unclear on this issue. In the three commonly cited verses – 33:53, 33:59–60, and 24:30–1 – different items are mentioned: a curtain (hijab), a cloak (jilbab), and a kerchief (khimar). Who is asked to cover (the Prophet’s wives versus all believers) and for what reasons (privacy, security, modesty) also differ in these verses, which complicates how to interpret what, if any, the Qur’ā nic directive is to cover. A Qur’ā nic justification for hijab is only possible through a holistic reading of the Qur’ā n, that links these verses and semantically expands the meaning of each.2 And certainly, in terms of what the hijab should materially look like, we have little guidance in these textual sources.

2

See the following for a more detailed explanation of this idea: Elizabeth Bucar, The Islamic Veil: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2012), 45–8.

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Because the Qur’ā n is capable of supporting multiple interpretations, and distinct readers bring different questions, concerns, and assumptions to the text, there are different understandings about what the Qur’ā n requires on many matters of dress. This is why adoption of headscarves within the Muslim community is not temporally static or geographically homogeneous. In Indonesia, the nation with the largest Muslim population, hijab was not a common practice until relatively recently. In the United States, where Muslims make up just over 1 per cent of the population, a 2017 Pew survey found that a little over half of the Muslim women wear a headscarf.3 In Iran, all women, even non-Muslim women, are required to cover their head in public, based on a specific interpretation of what is needed to create a Muslim public space in an Islamic republic. The fact that there is no global consensus does not take away from the fact that hijab is an important religious practice for many Muslim women, often described as the means to create and express piety.4 This piety operates on a number of levels. There is corporate piety, insofar as hijab creates a gender-segregated social space; there is interpersonal piety, insofar as hijab organizes the interactions of unrelated men and women; and there is personal piety, insofar as hijab has moral implications for the wearer herself. As I have written about elsewhere,5 virtue ethics is a helpful way to understand the manner in which hijab creates personal piety. Virtue ethics is an ethical theory that sees the cultivation of particular

3

4

5

‘U.S. Muslims Concerned about Their Place in Society, But Continue to Believe in the American Dream’, Pew Research Center, 26 July 2017, www.pewforum .org/2017/07/26/religious-beliefs-and-practices/ (accessed 27 July 2021). Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). See Elizabeth Bucar, ‘Islamic Virtue Ethics’, in Nancy Snow (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 206–23; Elizabeth Bucar, ‘Cultivating Virtues through Sartorial Practices: The Case of the Islamic Veil in Indonesia’, in Christian B. Miller, R. Michael Furr, Angela Knobel, and William Fleeson (eds.), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 590–602; Elizabeth Bucar, ‘Islam and the Cultivation of Character: Ibn Miskawayh’s Synthesis and the Case of the Veil’, in Nancy E. Snow (ed.), Cultivating Virtue: Multiple Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 197–226.

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moral excellences required to live an ethical life. Repetitive behaviour and physical habits are one way we acquire these virtues.6 These practices transform the person who adopts them by creating dispositions to behave a certain way: daily prayer cultivates humility, and fasting during Ramadan cultivates devotion.7 According to virtue theory, by wearing hijab every day a Muslim woman can change the sort of person she is. It is a practice some believe is required to make her a good Muslim. Even though we often consider the cultivation of character to be a personal task, it is also acutely political. The moral development of wearing a hijab, for instance, relies on learning norms about what to wear and then having an audience for the sartorial practice. This means that for a Muslim woman, choices about appropriate dress are shaped by discussions with multiple stakeholders about what it means to be a good Muslim woman, discussions that are shaped not only by the gender norms of Muslim communities in a given time and place but also by the politicization of women and religion by non-Muslim actors. The following sections will look at a few cases where this is pronounced.

hijab and the colonial encounter During the colonization and decolonization of Muslim-majority regions, the hijab took on new significance. Through discourse about religion, gender, and modernity, hijab became both a target of colonial reform and a method of resistance to occupation. In the words of the historian Leila Ahmed, it was during this period that the Islamic veil became ‘pregnant with meanings’.8

6

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Barbara Metcalf, ‘Remaking Ourselves: Islamic Self-Fashioning in a Global Movement of Spiritual Renewal’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 710. As the anthropologist Saba Mahmood concludes from her study of the Islamic piety movement in Egypt, pious acts ‘inhabit’ norms. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 15. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 166. For an expanded discussion of hijab and colonialism, see Bucar, The Islamic Veil, 67–85.

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European empires thought the success of the colonial project required local acceptance of a ‘proper’ role for religion in society and politics, which basically meant they expected religion in the colonies to conform to Christianity, at least in form if not content. At the same time, given commonly held assumptions in the West about the backwardness of the Muslim world, Islam was assumed to define native populations: the characteristic that made ‘them’ so different from the colonizer. As a result, all customs and beliefs that resisted the colonial project were labelled Islamic and Islam became the focus of colonial reforms in Muslim-majority colonies. This colonial dynamic changed Islam for Muslims as well. Once reforming Islamic practice was identified as part of the colonial project, being Muslim became not only a cultural and religious identity, but also a political one foundational to nationalist struggles. Take the example of French Algeria. ‘The French chose Islam as the Algerian common denominator and as grounds on which to fight them’, argues sociologist Marnia Lazreg, ‘likewise, Algerians responded by making Islam the bastion of their resistance to colonialism’.9 The politicization of Islam endured long after the Algerian War, as Islamists drew on Islamic thinkers such as Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), even after independence, for methods to make Algerians ‘more Islamic’ in an attempt to seize political power. For the colonizer and colonized alike, the colonial experience linked Islam and the political future of the nation in new and enduring ways. In addition to politicizing Islam, the process of colonization elevated women’s symbolic status to an important barometer of development. Women became seen by both the colonizers and the colonized as the depository of all culture so that a nation would only be as modern as its women. This meant local limitations of women’s rights, education, and public roles – as judged from the point of view of European norms – were used to justify the colonial project which would introduce European civilization that required changing women, including what they wore.

9

Marnia Lazreg, ‘Gender and Politics in Algeria: Unraveling the Religious Paradigm’, Signs, 15/4 (1990), 759.

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Consider the case of Egypt. At the time British occupation began, Egyptian women wore a wide variety of clothes, including a headcovering and a gauzy face veil. The face veil in particular became the target of British reform and thus political debate in Egypt. Lord Cromer, British Consul General who helped govern Egypt from 1883 to 1907, is a good example of how the British targeted women’s covering. Cromer made the veil a symbol of what was wrong with native populations, and framed himself and other British technocrats as the saviours of Egyptian women from forced veiling. However, as historian Leila Ahmed argues, this was a weaponization of quasi feminism to justify colonialism.10 For instance the actual policies Cromer put in place as Consul General, such as access to education, did not promote gender equity. Even more telling is the political position Cromer took on women’s rights back home in England where he was a founding member of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. He invoked women’s rights and empowerment only because it was rhetorically useful in creating a reason to control the local population. This also affected local Egyptian understanding of hijab as the colonial logic was internalized by native Muslim populations. Even those who rejected that uncovering women was necessary for modernization, began to accept the premise that women’s clothing was the depository of Muslim culture and faith. As Leila Ahmed argues, local Muslims ‘reappropriated, in order to negate them, the symbolic terms of the originating narrative’11 so that the hijab took on new importance not only to the colonizer but also to the colonized. As both the target of colonial reform and the method of resistance to occupation, hijab was elevated to the primary symbol of Muslim identity and difference for both Muslims and non-Muslims.

hijab and nation-making in muslim-majority countries Muslim-majority countries have often regulated women’s clothing as part of nation-building projects through official dress codes. Much of these efforts, instigated by male elites, have been based 10

Ahmed, Women and Gender, 153.

11

Ibid., 163–4.

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on the idea that Muslim women’s clothing reflects the modernity and moral health of the entire nation. But Muslim women have then also used their status as national symbols to assert their own visions for the nation, sometimes through what they wore. In this section I describe three examples from Iran, Indonesia, and Turkey.12 A part of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s vision for development of the area that is now Iran was a citizenry that dressed in European-style clothing. He discouraged head-covering and in 1936 banned the traditional full-length covering called a chador for all teachers as well as for wives of government officials. In 1941, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi replaced his father as shah and continued to encourage secular forms of women’s clothing, which led to increasing conflicts with Iranian Muslim leaders. Thus, in the first part of the twentieth century Iranian women were discouraged from any public use of Muslim clothing by government authorities. Dissatisfaction with the Pahlavi monarchy came to a head in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and Muslim women’s dress played an important role in the symbolic politics of that time as well. When women joined mass street protests, they often wore chador as a sign of resistance to government control (Figure 40.1). Images of what the Western press called ‘black crows’ were seen outside of Iran as a symbol of radical Islamism, but in fact the chador in Iran also read as anti-class and anti-capitalism, not merely as allegiance to the idea of an Islamic theocracy. The mass protests of 1979 culminated in the collapse of the Pahlavi dynasty and a national referendum that established an Islamic republic led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Within a month after the Islamic republic was established, all women in government offices were required to wear hijab. By 1983, Islamic hijab was compulsory throughout the republic. Today hijab in Iran is legally required in public for all women, but the styles include the full-body covering of traditional chador to tailored short overcoats and headscarves in various styles that 12

For a more detailed treatment of these three examples of local politics of modest dress, see Elizabeth Bucar, Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 25–30, 76–81, 125–9.

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Figure 40.1 Iranian women in chador protest during the Iranian Revolution against the repressive regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Tehran, Iran, 1978. Photo by Angelo Cozzi / Archivio Angelo Cozzi / Mondadori via Getty Image.

follow global fashion trends. Sometimes these style choices also have political meanings that are readable locally, such as the use of denim which was discouraged by some clerics after the revolution as a sign of Western immorality and even certain colours, such as red which is associated in Shi’i Islam with martyrdom. Within a regime that has attempted for decades to promote dress codes as a way to craft particular types of Muslim citizens, and in which direct political resistance is dangerous, clothing has become a form of political engagement that is potentially powerful because it can sometimes slide under the radar as a matter of culture versus statecraft. For example, dress becomes a way to access governmental office. Women hold numerous advisory roles in government. Chador is a requirement of appointment to these positions. But this limitation also creates an opportunity. Women can take advantage of the symbolic meaning of the chador to mark themselves as supporters of the theocracy, independent of their actual political views. Alternatively, since clothing is so strongly linked to woman’s

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character, a bad outfit can be seen as a reflection of poor female character. In Iran, there is even a term for this: bad hijab. Bad hijab can be both an ethical failure (too sexy) and an aesthetic failure (not tasteful). It’s a concern of the authorities because bad hijab in the too-sexy sense disrupts the public gendered space that Iranian theocracy tries to create. Wearing it can get a woman arrested. And since it is women’s public presentation and not men’s that is associated with the public morality of the nation, there is no such stigma attached to men’s sartorial failures.13 Indonesia is the most populous Muslim nation, but one that is often overlooked in scholarship on Muslim women’s fashion. This is unfortunate because, particularly when considered next to a case like Iran, we can see that Indonesia has its own distinct politics of hijab. First, unlike in the region that today is Iran, wearing a headscarf was not a common practice for Muslim women in Indonesia before the twentieth century.14 In the first decades after Indonesian independence, head-covering was explicitly discouraged. This continued when Major General Suharto rose to power: he banned headscarves in government offices and schools from 1982 until 1991. Suharto’s wife, who combined sarongs with elaborate blouses, became the sartorial model for an official vision of public femininity. Yet Suharto’s policies affected aspects of Indonesian culture and society during his term that ultimately laid the groundwork for the increased popularity of hijab. For instance, when all citizens were required to declare themselves adherents of one of five official religions, millions of Indonesians came to understand their Muslim identity in a new way. And since Suharto suppressed Islamic political parties, he inadvertently pushed Muslims to assert their faith in cultural ways such as clothing. After Suharto resigned, the popularity of hijab (locally called jilbab) skyrocketed. As young, college-educated women increasingly adopted pious fashion, it became a sign of a cosmopolitan woman. In addition, since a headscarf and modest outfit were not historically part of Islamic practice in this country, women were 13 14

For a more detailed treatment of bad hijab, see ibid., 50–4. Jean Gelman Taylor, ‘The Sewing-Machine in Colonial Era Photographs: A Record from Dutch Indonesia’, Modern Asian Studies, 46/1 (2012), 81, 90.

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free to wear these items to express a thoroughly modern identity that is entirely compatible with national development and progress (Figure 40.2).15 In Turkey, a country that sits between Europe and Asia, debates over Muslim women’s fashion have been central to both secular and Islamist political visions for this Muslim-majority nation. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who is considered the architect of Turkish secularism, became the first president of the Republic of Turkey after the First World War, he modelled his development programme on European secularism. The goal was to transition from a multi-religious Ottoman Empire to a unified secular republic. For Atatürk that transition included promoting Western aesthetics. Although Atatürk never officially banned the headscarf, the fez was outlawed for men in the Headgear Act of 1925.16 Under

Figure 40.2 Women competing at a local hijab styles fashion show in Indonesia’s Aceh province, 21 January 2018. CHAIDEER MAHYUDDIN / AFP via Getty Images.

15

16

For a more detailed treatment of the Indonesian politics of religious dress, see Bucar, Pious Fashion, 76–81. Banu Gökariksel and Katharyne Mitchell, ‘Veiling, Secularism, and the Neoliberal Subject: National Narratives and Supranational Desires in Turkey and France’, Global Networks, 5/2 (2005), 155.

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Kemalism European fashion trends were equated with good taste and hijab became politically defined as ugly and unmodern. With the death of the charismatic Atatürk in 1938 and the beginning of the Second World War, the country was thrown into turmoil. At the end of the war, Turkey attempted to return to its path towards secular democracy by establishing a multiparty system. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, corruption resulted in a run of coups. In 1980 General Kenan Evren’s successful military coup would lay the ground for Muslim women’s modest clothing re-emerging as a contentious political issue. It was during this time that headscarves were banned at universities. In the 1970s some civil servants were asked not to cover their hair. By 1982 the Council of Higher Education established a dress code for all universities.17 It is important to note that this dress code targeted a newly emergent style of head-covering, that was large, round, fixed with pins, and covered the hairline and the neck completely (Figure 40.3).18 This style was read as an expression of support for Islamists who threatened more secular visions for Turkey’s future. It was not until 2010, when the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) spearheaded a campaign against the ban, as a way to gain the favour of religious voters, that the ban was finally lifted. Under the leadership of the current Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğ an, who was elected in 2014, neo-Ottomanism has emerged as a political ideology. If Kemalism looked to the West for models of development, neo-Ottomanism looks to the Turkish Ottoman past. This has helped make headscarves more acceptable, or as marketing scholars Ozlem Sandikci and Güliz Ger argue, more politically and culturally fashionable.19 The current prominence of modest fashion in Istanbul, including the large, round headscarf style, is a sign of the waning of the European forms of secularism that dominated much of Turkish politics in the twentieth century. 17

18 19

For an English translation of the administrative provision, see Merve Kavakçi, Headscarf Politics in Turkey: A Postcolonial Reading (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 51. https://veil.unc.edu/regions/turkey/ (accessed 27 July 2021). Özlem Sandikci and Güliz Ger, ‘Veiling in Style: How Does a Stigmatized Practice Become Fashionable?’, Journal of Consumer Research, 37/1 (2010), 15–36.

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fashion and globalization: the politics of hijab

Figure 40.3 Portrait of young Muslim woman wearing the popular Turkish ‘round’ headscarf style in Ankara, Turkey. Getty Images.

In just these brief sketches of the role of hijab in nationalist politics we can see that in the last century hijab was banned, required, and ignored by various stakeholders for political agendas that actually had very little to do with supporting Muslim women as citizens.

hijab and identity politics According to the British philosopher Cressida Heyes, in the second half of the twentieth century ‘identity politics’ became the ground of political activity based in the shared experiences of certain social groups.20 This new political emphasis on identity had a profound impact on how religious minorities perceived themselves, and in particular the role of clothing in conveying religious identity. During this time, in countries where Islam was a minority religion, hijab began to function as a multivalent visual marker of identity.

20

Cressida Heyes, ‘Identity Politics’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2020/entries/identity-politics/ (accessed 27 July 2021).

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In general terms, identity can be defined as an individual’s sense of self or her group affiliation. In an article entitled ‘Becoming Muslim’, American sociologist Lori Peek provides a useful framework for understanding various types of Muslim identity. She proposes that there are three types of identity, which she associates with levels of identity a person moves through during normal social-psychological development: ascribed, chosen, and declared. An ascribed Muslim identity comes from being born into a Muslim family and raised in a Muslim home. Peek argues that as we grow older, we often move from an ascribed to a chosen identity after consideration of alternative options. If we take the example of Muslim immigrants, there are a number of ways in which this change can take place. A religious identity might have been assumed in the country of origin, where the majority shared the same religious affiliation. In a context where an immigrant is in a religious minority, however, there is pressure either to assimilate or to assert his or her cultural difference. As a result, Muslim identity becomes intentional and thus chosen, according to Peek’s classifications. Peek suggests that a declared identity often emerges after a ‘crisis event’ which requires reassertion of an identity.21 The self-awareness of identity is heightened for minorities, especially in contexts where minority communities are framed as perpetual foreigners. Turkish sociologist Nilüfer Göle proposes the concept of ‘stigma’ to explain why and how Muslims continue to be perceived as outsiders in areas where they are religious minorities.22 As Göle defines it, a stigma is an aspect of an individual that disqualifies her from being fully accepted by society. For Muslim women, hijab can be politically framed as the physical manifestation, and easily recognizable sign, of this stigma. If hijab is a symbol of Islamic stigma, however, it can also be reinvented through a process Göle calls the ‘management of spoiled identity’.23 Specifically, a change occurs when hijab is 21

22

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Lori Peek, ‘Becoming Muslim: The Development of a Religious Identity’, Sociology of Religion, 66/3 (2005), 215–42. Nilüfer Göle, ‘The Voluntary Adoption of Islamic Stigma Symbols’, Social Research, 70/3 (2003), 809. Ibid., 811.

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worn as part of Peek’s ‘chosen identity’. Much like the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community has reclaimed the label ‘queer’ from its former status as hate speech, when a Muslim woman chooses hijab as a symbol of pride in her Muslim heritage, this item of clothing is recast as a symbol of prestige. Muslim women thereby effectively turn an undesired difference into a sign of distinction. London-based anthropologist Emma Tarlo describes this change as a shift from being Muslim to being ‘visibly Muslim’, which ‘is based on actions rather than origins. It is about how people wish to be seen rather than how others define them . . . The category of visibly Muslim is open to anyone who chooses to identify with it, whatever their backgrounds or origins.’24 The chosen identity conveyed through hijab is not always only Islamic. In the British context, Tarlo finds, hijab often communicates a ‘Muslim immigrant’ identity, which is reflected in the hybridity of the fashion that Muslim women in the United Kingdom wear. Young Muslim immigrants often creatively combine popular fashion trends in their new home with patterns, fabrics, and colours that reference their nations of origin. ‘Their “Muslim looks”’, Tarlo argues, ‘are concerned not just with issues of modesty but with particular aesthetic sensibilities to colours, textures and patterns.’25 The US context provides an example of how a political crisis – namely 9/11 – can influence the perceived meaning of hijab. Suspicions of Muslims existed in mainstream American culture prior to 9/11, influenced by the Iranian Revolution, the first Persian Gulf War, and various terrorist bombings attributed to Islamist groups. American political scientist Samuel Huntington introduced the idea of a ‘clash of civilizations’ in his 1993 theory of foreign policy in which he framed the national interests of Muslim-majority nations as incompatible with those of Western nations such as the United States.26 24

25 26

Emma Tarlo, Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 12. Ibid., 41. Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993), 22–49.

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It is undeniable, however, that 9/11 greatly increased American Islamophobia. This event linked, even if unjustifiably, Islam to terror for many non-Muslim Americans, which resulted in an increase in the harassment of Muslims. The Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported over 1,500 cases of backlash discrimination against Muslims in the six months following the 9/11 attacks.27 Muslim women who wore hijab, as the most easily recognizable American Muslims, found themselves especially vulnerable to public harassment and becoming the potential victims of hate crimes. Some Muslim women supported abandoning hijab at 9/11, arguing that it was not crucial to Muslim identity and that it made Muslim women targets in the post-9/11 climate. The Muslim Women’s League, for instance, published a fatwa in 2001 that read as follows: ‘If a Muslim woman senses the possibility of danger to herself, adjusting her attire to minimize the chances of physical attack is a logical and Islamically permissible precaution that falls squarely within the fiqh principles of necessity and hardship.’28 And yet, even as some women stopped wearing hijab after 9/11 as a precaution, scores of other women, particularly young women, put on hijab for the first time in a clear case of what Peek calls a ‘declared’ identity. This reclaiming of a ‘damaged identity’ can be interpreted in a number of ways. First, it can be seen as an act of defiance against the increased Islamophobia in the American political context and as a symbol of increased group solidarity. In the face of post-9/11 threats and drawing on the value of pluralism, Muslim Americans asserted their shared experience and identity, making the divisions within the Muslim American community less relevant. Second, reclaiming hijab helped maintain a public role for Islam. As a visual affirmation of Muslim identity, it helped a public expression of this identity to survive. This affirmation of hijab changes its meaning in the American context from what Nilüfer Göle described as a stigma, to what historian Yvonne Haddad calls an icon, namely a ‘symbol of the 27

28

Human Rights Watch, as quoted in Ashraf Zahedi, ‘Muslim American Women in the Post-11 September Era’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 13/2 (2011), 188. Ibid., 190.

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refusal to be defined by the Western media and war propaganda since 9/11, and of affirming authentic Muslim and American identity’.29 But attempts to reclaim hijab have not meant a decrease in discrimination for visibly Muslim women in the US context. A 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center found that more than half of Muslim women living in the United States say they had experienced at least one incident of anti-Muslim discrimination in the last year.30 The same survey found that discrimination is even more common for Muslims whose appearance identifies them as Muslim, such as women who wear hijab. Muslim women in the United States have been fired from jobs for wearing hijab. Muslim girls who wear hijab have been harassed and assaulted at school and prevented from participating in sports events. There are cases of Muslim women being barred from public places such as sports arenas, amusement parks, and shopping malls for their attire.31 Muslim women have been harassed for their head-covering both when being arrested and when they have called the police for help. Muslim women have been denied the right to wear a headscarf while in jail or detention. They have had their headscarves removed by police for mugshots with such frequency there have been a number of civil cases filed again police departments.32 The United States is not the only place where Muslim women face specific forms of discrimination based on their styles of clothing. Targeting Muslim women’s clothing to bar Muslims from participating fully in civic life is a common occurrence in a number of Western nations, with 29

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Yvonne Haddad, ‘The Post-9/11 Hijab as Icon’, Sociology of Religion, 68/3 (2007), 254. Pew Research Center, ‘U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream’, 26 July 2017. ACLU, ‘Discrimination against Muslim Women-Fact Sheet’, www.aclu.org/ot her/discrimination-against-muslim-women-fact-sheet#17 (accessed 27 July 2021). See, for example, G.E. v. City of New York et al., no. 2012 Civ. 05967 (E.D.N. Y. 2017) ($60,000 per person); Soliman v. City of New York et al., no. 2015 Civ. 05310 (E.D.N.Y. 2018) ($60,000 per person); Kirsty Powell v. City of Long Beach et al., no. 2016 Civ. 02966 (C.D. Cal. 2017) ($85,000); Al-Kadi v. Ramsey County et al., no. 2016 Civ. 02642 (Minn. Dist. Ct. 2019) ($120,000); Musa v. City of New York, Index no. 151601/2017 (N.Y. Supreme) ($85,000); Jennifer Hyatt v. County of Ventura et al., no. 2018 Civ. 03788 (C.D. Cal. 2018) ($75,000).

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French attempts to limit the use of everything from burkinis to headscarves to face veils arguably the most infamous. One institutional location where the identity politics of hijab has been quite heated is in French public schools, where strict and controversial headscarf bans have been referred to as the French Veil Affair. France has the largest population of Muslims in Europe in terms of percentage of the population – in 2017 almost 9 per cent.33 This is the result of a post-war open-door policy for immigration, when France actively recruited labour from abroad, especially from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Immigration tightened during the Algerian War (1954–62) and then loosened in the 1970s when families, as opposed to only male labourers, were allowed to immigrate to France. But the combination of racism and the French recession of the 1970s created the political narrative that Muslim immigrants were taking jobs from native French. At the same time, the children of immigrants began to access social services as French citizens, which was perceived by some French as putting further strain on an already strapped French government. As Muslims became more common in public schools, the hijab became the focus of anxiety over a perceived threat from Muslim immigrants. The infamous French Veil Affair was actually made up of a series of separate controversies that culminated in a 2004 law banning the Islamic head-covering from all French schools (Figure 40.4). The first incident involved the expulsions of three Muslim girls in 1989 from middle school for refusing to remove their headscarves. The second incident occurred in 1994 when the Minister of Education issued a memorandum banning all conspicuous signs of religious affiliation from the classroom. Between 1994 and 2003 approximately 100 girls were suspended or expelled from schools for hijab, although in almost half of these cases they were allowed to return to the classroom after French courts overturned their expulsion. In order to make the ban of signs of religious affiliation in schools more enforceable throughout France, Parliament passed a new law in 2004. Sometimes referred to as the ‘veil law’, it forbids

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Pew Research Center, ‘Europe’s Growing Muslim Population’, 29 November 2017, www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-popula tion/ (accessed 27 July 2021).

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Figure 40.4 A Muslim woman demonstrates in Paris against the French proposal to bar Muslim women from wearing headscarves in state schools, 17 January 2004. Photo by Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images.

the use of any ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols, including not only Muslim headscarves but also Jewish kippa, Sikh turbans, and large Christian crosses. This law is applied almost exclusively to Muslim women who veil. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) upheld the legality of the French ban in 2008, arguing the French government was ensuring ‘the manifestation by pupils of their religious belief on school premises did not take on the nature of an ostentatious act that would constitute a source of pressure and exclusion’ (ECHR, 2008, Art. 9). A new law banning face veils, or niqab, in public came into effect in France in April 2011. Police are instructed to ask women to remove veils for identification. If women refuse, they can be fined up to 150 euros. This law applied to any woman in any public place such as schools, government buildings, courtrooms, hospitals, public transportation, and even on the street. The primary rationale given for official attempts to ban hijab is the protection of French secularism – laïcité – which understands

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the separation of church and state to be best maintained by protecting individuals from the claims of religions.34 Public spaces are supposed to be religiously neutral in this conception of secularism. Any ‘conspicuous’ religious symbol is a challenge to laïcité, especially in public schools, which are perceived to be an extension of the state and responsible for forming future generations of French citizens. This challenge is particularly concerning in the form of hijab, which for some French includes a sense of defiance and acts as a reminder of the failure of French civilization in the Algerian colonial context. Some maintain that French secularism requires French citizens to give up hijab in order to prove their commitment to French Republican ideals. Deploying laïcité against forms of Muslim women’s clothing was also exported from France. The francophone province of Quebec in Canada passed a similar law in 2019 barring public employees from wearing any overt religious symbols, but it was clear that, as in the case with France, the legislation was directed at secularizing the clothing of the female Muslim population. As we have seen, given the complexity of hijab, it can mean very different things when analysed as the expression identity. For instance, the decision to wear hijab in the United Kingdom by second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants could be seen as the expression of a chosen identity. In this context, hijab becomes instrumental in the expression of a chosen hybrid cultural character through mixing both mainstream fashion and apparel that references their countries of origin. Compare this to the effect of 9/11 on the veiling practices of Muslim Americans. After this crisis event hijab became a more important symbol of American Muslim declared identity, not only to some Muslim Americans but also to non-Muslim Americans. Because hijab is such a strong visual marker of identity, it is often assumed to convey someone’s dominant identity, which can challenge some political theories such as French secularism, or laïcité. But what is clear is that when Muslim women, who live in areas where they are part of

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Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 15.

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a religious minority, choose to express their identity through clothing it is always read as a political act.35

the global modesty apparel industry Against a backdrop of widespread harassment and discrimination of Muslim women for religious sartorial choices, modest clothing in general and the hijab specifically have recently been embraced by the global fashion and beauty industry. Modest apparel includes hijabs, but also tops with long sleeves and high necklines, dresses, trousers, and skirts with long hemlines. Some garments are loose and flowy, others are tailored and structured, but all are designed to cover and conceal rather than display the shape of the body. The decision to wear this type of clothing can be due to religious or cultural reasons: modesty is a popular fashion choice among orthodox Jewish women36 and women from the Latter-Day Saints community. It can also be worn by women who are interested in cultivating an aesthetic that is feminine but not sexualized, elegantly simplistic, and embodies a sense of what UNIQLO calls ‘a rich sense of cultural diversity’.37 In 2018 the global modest fashion industry was worth US$283 billion and is expected to grow to US$402 billion by 2024.38 This growth of the modest apparel sector is the result of the development and marketing of ‘Muslim lifestyle’, the creativity of Muslim entrepreneurs, and the realization 35 36

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Tarlo, Visibly Muslim. A similar assumption exists among Hasidic women in Brooklyn, as described by anthropologist Ayala Fader. Fader tells us that ‘the aim for Hasidic women and girls is to be able to discipline their bodies and desires, to use their moral autonomy to participate in and transform the material world. Vanity, adornment, consumption and secular knowledge are not denied but . . . must be “channeled,” like the rest of the material world, and made to serve Hasidic goals of community building and redemption.’ Ayala Fader, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 147–8. www.uniqlo.com/us/en/page/hana-tajima.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI-qP1 lp687gIVCvCzCh2EoQGqEAAYASAAEgJHTPD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds (accessed 1 May 2021). ‘Measuring for Size: How Big Is the World’s Modest Fashion Industry?’, Salaam Gateway, 11 November 2019, www.salaamgateway.com/story/measuring-forsize-how-big-is-the-worlds-modest-fashion-industry (accessed 5 September 2020).

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of a potentially lucrative broader modesty market by the apparel industry. A feature of contemporary Muslim politics has been debates about the role of consumption in Islamic life. In the 1970s, Islamists were promoting an anti-consumerist lifestyle as a way to combat what they saw as the moral corruption caused by materialism and desires generated by capitalism. But by the 1990s, facilitated by the growth of a local Islamic bourgeoisie, they began supporting the idea of a Muslim lifestyle expressed through consumption.39 In this model, religion is not corrupted by consumption; rather, consumption becomes the mechanism through which religious ideals are transformed into aesthetic style.40 Within the context of increasing acceptance that a Muslim lifestyle achieved, in part through consumption, buying modest clothing became framed as self-actualization through shopping, a process that sanctifies the material world because purchased items are used for religious goals.41 Fashionably dressed Muslim women became role models and inspirations for others who are considering modest dress. In these economies, Muslim women were not just the target of marketing campaigns; they were consumers in their own right, who desired designer handbags, flattering styles, and colourful headscarves.42 Modest fashion has exploded in part because of the innovation of Muslim designers and influencers who cultivated and then met demand for fashion-forward modest apparel. Indonesian-born Dian Pelangi, for instance, is admired for her personal style by her over

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Amel Boubekeur and Olivier Roy describe this as a shift to an activist culture of consumption, in which various modes of production and consumption are used ‘to reintroduce an Islamic ethos into the various forms of leisure that they once shunned’. Amel Boubekeur and Olivier Roy, ‘Introduction’, in Amel Boubekeur and Oliver Roy (eds.), Whatever Happened to the Islamists? Salafis, Heavy Metal Muslims, and the Lure of Consumerist Islam (London: Hurst, 2012), 9. Carla Jones, ‘Images of Desire: Creating Virtue and Value in an Indonesian Islamic Lifestyle Magazine’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6/3 (2010), 103. Ibid., 111. Karen Hansen, ‘The World in Dress: Anthropological Perspectives on Clothing, Fashion, and Culture’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), 383.

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five million Instagram followers. Her growing fashion brand uses colour and bold prints in youthful collections shown in Europe and the Middle East as well as regularly at Jakarta Fashion Week (Figure 40.5). The British-Japanese Muslim designer Hana Tajima’s first collection for UNIQLO in 2016 was a groundbreaking collaboration by a Muslim designer and mainstream brand, and it allowed her to find a larger market for her modest designs infused with her love of Japanese simplicity. Lisa Vogl, Muslim American designer of the popular Verona brand, favours ruffles, large prints, and maxi dresses for her label, which is now sold by the online retailer ASOS as well as the iconic New Yorkbased department store Macy’s. Global clothing brands have also begun to incorporate more modest styles into collections as a way to capture Muslim and non-Muslim consumers drawn to the cut and form of modest styles. Dolce & Gabbana has a collection of headscarves and coordinated abayas sold at London-based Harrods. The luxury British online retailer Net-a-Porter offers a ‘modest edit’ of

Figure 40.5 A model showcases designs on the runway by Dian Pelangi during the Jakarta Fashion Week 2015 at Senayan City in Jakarta, Indonesia, 1 November 2014. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti / Getty Images.

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high-end designs.43 DKNY and Mango both market Ramadan collections. H&M, Nike, and Gap have all run campaigns featuring hijab-wearing models. Magazines and catwalks are growing more inclusive too. In 2018 Halima Aden became the first hijab-wearing model to grace the cover of British Vogue but hijab-wearing models are becoming increasingly common during New York and Paris Fashion Week. For instance, in the 2019 Paris Fashion Week seven hijabi models walked the catwalk for brands like Valentino and Tommy Hilfiger. Companies who promote modest lines or hire hijabi brand representatives are not just targeting Muslim women. This is also an appeal to non-Muslim consumers who value diversity and inclusivity in the marketplace. In other words, progressive political ideals combined with design innovations have led to the increasing promotion of modest aesthetics, including hijab, by the global fashion industry.

directions for future research Whether leveraged for colonial projects, nationalist agendas, or a newly popular lifestyle brand, much of the political promotion of hijab and modest clothing presumes that religious otherness is literally held in the bodies of women. When Muslim women are assumed to be the receptacles and conveyors of religion, their sartorial choices take on extra meaning. Scholars contribute this to over-representation as well. While there are hundreds of scholarly studies on the politics of hijab, the ways in which the politicization of Muslim men’s clothing globally has had different relations to tradition, modernity, nationalism, and religion have largely been ignored by scholars. An exception in the field of Islamic studies is Su’ad Abdul Khabeer’s excellent book Muslim Cool,44 which describes how American Black Muslim men construct identity with clothing.

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www.net-a-porter.com/en-gb/shop/what-to-wear/the-modest-edit (accessed 27 July 2021). Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

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From a textual point of view, men also have a duty to dress modestly. Qur’ā n 24:30 says, ‘Tell believing men to lower their glances and guard their private parts: that is purer for them. God is well aware of everything they do.’ A common interpretation of this passage is that Muslim men should cover their bodies at least from the navel to below the knee and to avoid other forms of exposure, like extremely tight clothing. Some hadiths describe the Prophet Muhammad as covering his face as a sign of respect, for example when he appeared before his father-in-law. And among the Tuareg, a Berber Muslim tribe, men, not women, wear a low turban and a face veil. For the Tuareg, the veil is not a sign of femininity, but rather of masculinity and male fertility.45 Despite the lacuna of scholarship on the subject, the clothing of Muslim men is also politicized. The black-and-white checked head cloth (keffiyeh), for instance, has become a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. Turbans became part of the unofficial dress code of Taliban leaders and supporters in Afghanistan in the 1990s. But most notable about Muslim men’s fashion is the widespread adoption of Western ‘secular’ dress such as trousers, shirts, and jackets. These styles are almost as modest as Muslim women’s attire, with the exception of a headscarf, but male modesty does not get interpreted as religious or pious in the same way. Instead, men’s clothing is promoted as a symbol of the nation’s power and modernity while women’s clothing serves as the depository of morality, honour, and ethnic identity. The second area of continuing research I would like to suggest is how local politics affects styles of hijab. Reina Lewis, Emma Tarlo, Carla Jones, Banu Gokariksel, Anna Secor, Ozlem Sandikci, and Güliz Ger have done this work in their careful studies of religious clothing in the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and Turkey.46 In my last book, Pious Fashion, I try to capture this dynamic through looking at style snapshots within the context of local aesthetic 45

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See Fadwa El Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy, and Resistance (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 119. Reina Lewis, Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Tarlo, Visibly Muslim; Jones, ‘Images of Desire’; Banu Gökarıksel and Anna Secor, ‘Between Fashion and Tesettür: Marketing and Consuming Women’s Islamic Dress’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6/3 (2010), 118–48; Sandikci and Ger, ‘Veiling in Style’.

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authorities such as designers, influencers, clerics, and institutions.47 And yet since these dynamics are constantly changing, there is a need for ongoing research in this area to help understand how hijab is not only a global concept but also diverse in its material practice and meaning at the local level. The fashion choices of Muslim women today are rarely seen as politically neutral, and how they are specifically politicized depends on cultures of styles, interpretations of Islamic aesthetics, as well as national visions of womanhood and citizenship. For instance, in the United States there is much more to think through about the political implications of modest clothing going mainstream in this context, where Muslims are part of a minority population. The proliferation of everything from designer to readyto-wear modest clothing options, as well as the frequency of hijab in marketing campaigns, is a clear sign of a new level of visibility and acceptance of modesty fashion in popular culture. But this is not a simple story of increased representation. There is also the more ethically ambivalent fact that brands deploy hijab as a way to signal their commitment to diversity and inclusion, without necessarily making any systematic changes, for example in hiring practices. Politically, I want to suggest, when the aesthetics of modesty goes mainstream it makes hijab an attractive way to symbolize support for the Muslim community, often by nonMuslims who adopt and circulate the aesthetics of hijab in their political campaigns. This happened literally during the United States 2020 presidential election when both Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, leading candidates for the Democratic nomination, used the image of hijab-wearing women in their promotional material, without the permission of these women (who in both cases were supporters of a different candidate).48 In the United States hijab has even been adopted as a symbol of progressive feminist politics, beginning with the 2017 Women’s March through Shepard Fairey’s stylized portrait of a Muslim woman 47 48

Bucar, Pious Fashion. Erum Salam, ‘“Hijabi Clout”: The Women of Color Unknowingly Used by 2020 Campaigns’, The Guardian, 8 February 2020, www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2020/feb/08/hijabi-clout-women-unknowingly-pictured-campaign -ads-biden-warren-clinton (accessed 27 July 2021).

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wearing a flag hijab, an image adopted to protest against Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration around the world (Figure 40.6). The fact that the meaning of hijab is the subject of ongoing debate within the community – for example whether or not a headscarf is obligatory, recommended, or unnecessary for a modern Muslim woman – does not diminish the stakes when others adopt it for political agendas. On the contrary, it makes the appropriation of hijab as the sign of Muslim womanhood even more fraught because it takes a side in the ongoing debate within the community. These progressive political uses of hijab by non-Muslims also contribute to a cultural shift in the meaning of hijab: away from an embodied sartorial practice to cultivate a particular religiously informed character to a symbol of liberal wokeness. For the Muslim women who depend on hijab to be readable as a practice of personal piety, their ability to cultivate their own character is thwarted when the practice is used to signify a commitment to some vague notion of inclusion.

Figure 40.6 US artist Shepard Fairey’s flag hijab image during a protest of US Democrats Abroad in Berlin on 21 January 2017, one day after the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. GREGOR FISCHER / DPA / AFP via Getty Images.

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Finally, rather than recognizing Muslim women as agents, using the aesthetics of modesty and hijab to signal solidarity frames Muslim women as passive.49 This is the same dynamic we saw in the colonial encounter, just flipped on its head. Instead of saving Muslim women from Muslim men – by banning a veil – solidarity hijab offers a way to save Muslim women from the white men of the alt-right. But both cases assume Muslim women need outsiders to save them. In this way solidarity hijab makes the gendered dimension of Islamophobia worse, not better, by trading on an image of Muslim woman as subjects to be saved by feminists instead of agents of feminist intersectional change.

select bibliography Ahmed, Leila, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Bucar, Elizabeth, Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Bucar, Elizabeth, The Islamic Veil: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2012). Bucar, Liz, Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022). Gökarıksel, Banu and Anna Secor, ‘Between Fashion and Tesettür: Marketing and Consuming Women’s Islamic Dress’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6/3 (2010), 118–48. Göle, Nilüfer, ‘The Voluntary Adoption of Islamic Stigma Symbols’, Social Research, 70/3 (2003), 809–28. Haddad, Yvonne, ‘The Post-9/11 Hijab as Icon’, Sociology of Religion, 68/3 (2007), 253–67. Jones, Carla, ‘Images of Desire: Creating Virtue and Value in an Indonesian Islamic Lifestyle Magazine’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6/3 (2010), 91–117. Khabeer, Su’ad Abdul, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2016). Lazreg, Marnia, ‘Gender and Politics in Algeria: Unraveling the Religious Paradigm’, Signs, 15/4 (1990), 755–80.

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For a more detailed explanation of this idea, see Liz Bucar, Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 35–81.

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fashion and globalization: the politics of hijab Lewis, Reina, Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Mahmood, Saba, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Peek, Lori, ‘Becoming Muslim: The Development of a Religious Identity’, Sociology of Religion, 66/3 (2005), 215–42. Sandikci, Özlem and Güliz Ger, ‘Veiling in Style: How Does a Stigmatized Practice Become Fashionable?’, Journal of Consumer Research, 37/1 (2010), 15–36. Scott, Joan Wallach, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Tarlo, Emma, Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith (Oxford: Berg, 2010).

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STREETSCAPE, SHOP WINDOW, MUSEUM VITRINE Displaying Fashion, c. 1800–2000 julia petrov

introduction It may be argued that simply by wearing clothing and adorning our bodies every day, each of us participates in a kind of display. Dress is a means by which humans present themselves in society,1 and for centuries, those at the top of society used dress in ways that displayed their power, status, and leisure. As social structures evolved and changed in the nineteenth century, the display of dress took on a different character. After the French Revolution and with the long-term rise of the middle class, more and more people could participate in the pleasure of conspicuous consumption. The venues for this display were no longer the fixtures of political power – palace and church – but instead, the much more democratic street and store. In addition, fashion became understood as a phenomenon that defined modernity itself.2 Alongside the increased awareness of historical time passing, a further venue

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Mary Ellen Roach and Joanne B. Eicher, ‘Introduction to the Study of Dress, Adornment, and the Social Order’, in Mary Ellen Roach and Joanne B. Eicher (eds.), Dress, Adornment, and the Social Order (New York: John Wiley, 1965), 1–3; Kim K. P. Johnson, S. Torntore, and Joanne B. Eicher, ‘Introduction’, in Kim K. P. Johnson, S. Torntore, and Joanne B. Eicher (eds.), Fashion Foundations: Early Writings on Fashion and Dress (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 1–3. Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans (eds.), Fashion and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2005); Ilya Parkins, ‘Fashion as Methodology: Rewriting the Time of Women’s Modernity’, Time & Society, 19/1 (2010), 98–119; Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).

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for fashion display emerged: the museum, which framed the consumption and display of dress as a cultural phenomenon. This chapter examines how dress came to become the object of new kinds of display, and how the venues for that display continue to be enmeshed within a value system of consumption.

street style: shopping and viewership The architecture of the modern city was geared towards visual consumption; wide, paved avenues and boulevards commanded perspectives, while illuminated shopfronts invited lingering glances. Technological advances made artificial lighting on streets and inside shops increasingly common, while larger and larger panes of glass made possible in the nineteenth century revealed a wide range of wares on offer. Upscale shopping moved goods from the street to well-organized and comfortably furnished shops, which increasingly focused on drawing customers inside.3 In addition to high-street rows of shopfronts, arcades and covered passages encouraged leisure and shopping even in inclement weather. The German novelist and diarist Sophie von la Roche wrote of her impressions of the shopping spaces of London in 1786: It is almost impossible to express how well everything is organized in London. Every article is made more attractive to the eye than in Paris or in any other town. . . We especially noticed a cunning device for showing women’s materials. Whether they are silks, chintzes, or muslins, they hang down in folds behind the fine high windows so that the effect of this or that material, as it would be in the ordinary folds of a woman’s dress, can be studied. Amongst the muslins all colours are on view, and so one can judge how the frock would look in company with its fellows. Now large shoe and slipper shops for anything from adults down to dolls can be seen – now fashion articles or silver or brass shops – boots, guns, glasses – the confectioner’s goodies, the pewterer’s wares – fans, etc. Behind great glass windows absolutely everything one can think of is

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Claire Walsh, ‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design History, 8/3 (1995), 157–76.

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julia petrov neatly, attractively displayed, and in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy.4

Von la Roche discussed display devices used by haberdashers for made-to-measure clothing, but ready-to-wear clothing was also available. A rare and valuable account of a tailor’s shop is given by the English social reformer Francis Place, who wrote that he and his business partner Richard Wild opened a shop at Charing Cross in 1799: with a handsome shew of choice mercery goods, and in a few days some very fashionable waistcoats were placed in the Shop windows. At this time there was no shop at the West-end of the Town which exposed first rate fashionable articles of dress for men in the windows and we sold a considerable number of waistcoats at a high price.5

The success of this display technique demonstrates that cultivating male fashion consumers was an important strategy for retailers.6 Indeed, innovations in the tailoring business were responsible for the two display methods we now take for granted: the fashion model and the store mannequin. Dress historian Alison Matthews David dates the appearance of male tailor’s mannequins (living and sculpted) used for retail display to the 1830s and 1840s, in parallel with the standardization of men’s clothing manufacture, and the rise of shopping spaces as a site of urban leisure.7 These displays were intended to be seductive, catering equally to homoerotic and narcissistic pleasures.8 French and English literature of the 1840s highlighted the entertainment value of the new tailor’s dummies, comparing these novel objects to waxworks, with which contemporary readers 4

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Sophie von la Roche, Sophie in London, 1786: Being the Diary of Sophie v. la Roche, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), 87. Francis Place, The Autobiography of Francis Place, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Mary Thale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 201. Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion, and City Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Alison Matthews David, ‘Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin’, Fashion Studies, 1/1 (2018), 1–46. Ibid., 16–17.

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were already familiar.9 Often, it was satirical authors who highlighted the growing consumer obsession with such spectacle. In 1842 and 1843, the English magazine Punch published several articles featuring entertaining street scenes punctuated by mannequins, such as ‘the al fresco and gratuitous exhibition of wax-work at the door of the tailor’s opposite’ the Pantheon Bazaar.10 French satirist J. J. Grandville’s alternative Paris of 1844 was entirely populated by mannequins,11 the exaggeration nevertheless underscoring the rapid growth in both merchandising techniques as well as public engagement with them. Likewise, George Augustus Sala, an English journalist, highlighted the ritual of opening shopfronts in his light-hearted 1859 account of twenty-four hours in London: In the magnificent linendrapery establishments of Oxford and Regent Streets, the vast shop-fronts, museums of fashion in plateglass cases, offer a series of animated tableaux of poses plastiques in the shape of young ladies in morning costume, and young gentlemen in whiskers and white neckcloths, faultlessly complete as to costume, with the exception that they are yet in their shirt sleeves, who are accomplishing the difficult and mysterious feat known as ‘dressing’ the shop window. By their nimble and practised hands the rich piled velvet mantles are displayed, the moire and glacé silks arranged in artful folds, the laces and gauzes, the innumerable whim-whams and fribble-frabble of fashion, elaborately shown, and to their best advantage.12

The staff and shop fixtures meld here into one another. Simultaneously animate and inanimate, they both exist for the delectation of passers-by. Elizabeth Wilson comments on the 9

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Private waxworks also displayed the clothing of the elite, most famous among them being Tussaud’s, established in London in 1802, after fleeing the French Revolution with the death masks of the French royal family. Tussaud’s famously clothed its mannequins in their own dress, which it often acquired through auction: Mark B. Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). A. Smith, ‘The Physiology of the London Idler, Chapter 4 – Of the Pantheon, Considered in Relation to the Lounger’, Punch, 3 (July–December 1842), n.p. J. J. Grandville, Un autre monde (Paris: H. Fournier, 1844), 70. George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock; or, the Hours of the Day and Night in London (London: Houlston and Wright, 1859), 77.

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erotic nature of the voyeurism and exhibitionism inherent in the ‘silent gaze’ necessary to take in city life.13 There were new terms for the people who enjoyed these new pleasures of the city: flâneurs partook of urban mysteries in a detached fashion, while boulevardiers took advantage of the new spaces to shop and enjoy the wares laid out for them. The former were bohemian connoisseurs, while the latter were the bourgeois target audience for newly available mass-market luxuries. According to the nineteenth-century French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, the key pleasure of the modern city and its leisured urban explorers was fashion.14 The novel architecture of the department store also became a space of both display and spectacle. In French novelist Émile Zola’s description, the fictional crowded Paradise department store is a visual feast, with mirrors multiplying the merchandise but also the customers to themselves and each other: And this sea of faces, these many-coloured hats, these bare heads, both dark and light, rolled from one end of the gallery to the other, confused and discoloured amidst the loud glare of the stuffs. Madame Desforges could see nothing but large price tickets bearing enormous figures everywhere, their white patches standing out on the bright printed cottons, the shining silks, and the sombre woollens. Piles of ribbons curtailed the heads, a wall of flannel threw out a promontory; on all sides the mirrors carried the departments back into infinite space, reflecting the displays with portions of the public, faces reversed, and halves of shoulders and arms; whilst to the right and to the left the lateral galleries opened up other vistas, the snowy background of the linen department, the speckled depth of the hosiery one, distant views illuminated by the rays of light from some glazed bay, and in which the crowd appeared nothing but a mass of human dust. Then, when Madame Desforges raised her eyes, she saw, along the staircases, on the flying bridges, around the balustrade of each storey, a continual humming ascent, an entire population in the air, travelling in the cuttings of the 13 14

Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 135–6. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le peinture de la vie moderne’, Le Figaro, 26 and 28 November and 3 December 1863, from a text of 1859, all in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 1–40.

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displaying fashion, c. 1800–2000 enormous ironwork construction, casting black shadows on the diffused light of the enamelled windows.15

Zola was inspired by the interiors of Paris’s Le Bon Marché, one of the first department stores in the world, famous for its innovations in retailing and architecture (Figure 41.1). A busy store interior was a signal of the desirability of the goods on offer within, and an inducement for customers to venture inside. Figure 41.2 shows two women sharing in the pleasures of window shopping outside a fashionable Parisian store; behind them, a footman in livery steps outside with a newly purchased parcel of goods to deliver. That this illustration is a fashion plate adds a further level of voyeurism and consumer education to the meaning of the image: the reader of the fashion magazine is told not only where such gowns may be purchased, but also how desirable shopping venues may be explored.

Figure 41.1

15

View of the interior of Le Bon Marché, engraving from L’Univers Illustré, 1872. Bridgeman Images.

Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise: A Realistic Novel, trans. E. A. Vizetelly (London: Vizetelly & Co, 1886), 222.

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Figure 41.2 Jules David, ‘1066c: Etoffes et Nouveautés’, Le Moniteur des Dames et des Demoiselles, 1872. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-20093607.

The windows of these department stores, still renowned for their inventive and alluring displays, functioned as enticements to buyers (usually female) to partake in the fantasy of fashion on offer (Figure 41.3). Customers were then encouraged to see themselves within shop windows, or at least to recognize mannequins as substitute human bodies that inhabited the clothes on display. In writing about window dressing in twentieth-century America, Emily R. Klug discussed the liminal character of these later mannequins: ‘As the shop window joins the street to the department store, the display and, more specifically, the mannequin acts as an intermediary between the consumer pre- and postshopping trip and

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displaying fashion, c. 1800–2000

Figure 41.3 Chromolithograph of the exterior of the Harrods department store, London, 1909. Bridgeman Images.

presumably pre- and postbeautification.’16 Figure 41.4, a 1925 photograph of a Parisian department store window by French flâneur Eugène Atget (1857–1927) shows this well: it is difficult at first to distinguish whether the walking figure is a Parisienne on the sidewalk or a mannequin inside the vitrine. The huge glass fronts of clothing stores blurred the distinction between the street and the shop, and the mannequins posed within were fashion objects meant to mimic the live consumer fashion subjects.

the exhibitionary complex By the late nineteenth century, such spectacle was normalized in major European cities, as an 1874 report from Paris mused: ‘What are the long lines of the boulevard windows and those of the Rue de la Paix but an exhibition of clothes? From hat to shoe, from 16

Emily R. Klug, ‘Allure of the Silent Beauties: Mannequins and Display in America, 1935–70’, in John Potvin (ed.), The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007 (London: Routledge: 2009), 200–13, here 211.

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Figure 41.4

Eugène Atget, Storefront, avenue des Gobelins, 1925, Gelatin silver print. J. Paul Getty Museum, 84.XM.1034.15.

innermost flannel to outermost velvet, every style and article of human costume is exhibited.’17 These early writings about the urban shopping experience underline the museum quality of mannequins, merchandise, and even staff on display behind glass as though in a museum, although no such permanent venue for dress yet actually existed. At the same time as the modern understanding of shopping was being formed and transformed, these same paradigms were being used to other ends. Alongside fashionable shops, exhibitions featuring scientific and historical curiosities drew leisured urban dwellers. The jeweller and goldsmith William Bullock housed his 17

L. H. Hooper, ‘The Exhibition of Costumes’, Appleton’s Journal, 12 (1874), 623–6, here 624.

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private museum first in Liverpool, and then on Piccadilly in London; in 1812, he commissioned the building of a special exhibition hall, which housed exhibitions of ethnography, natural history, and art for over fifty years. Between 1833 and 1835, another enterprising Londoner, the watchmaker William Anthony, displayed a collection of the clothes of the women of the family of Oliver Cromwell,18 first on Regent Street, and then in the Strand; this may have been the first documented exhibition of historical fashion.19 Art exhibitions begin to feature as fashionable locations in fashion plates in ladies’ magazines in the nineteenth century, as well. The June 1815 issue of Ackermann’s Repository featured a woman in ‘carriage dress’ gazing at landscape paintings, possibly one of the works on display by the Society of Painters in Watercolours, at the Royal Academy, or by Flemish and Dutch Masters at the British Institution, Pall Mall, all described in the same issue.20 The magazine was distributed globally, including to North America, the Caribbean, Germany, Portugal, Gibraltar, Malta, South Africa, and India, so that even colonial readers might be apprised of the latest metropolitan fashions and have occasion to commission similar outfits for events in their locales. In April 1826, La Belle Assembleé published a fashion plate of ‘Morning Exhibition Dress’, which it claimed was ‘a fashion admirably appropriate to the coming season of spring’;21 venues for wearing such a garment listed in the same issue included fine arts exhibitions at the British Institution, The Society of British Artists at Suffolk Street, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Adoration of Saint Anthony at Bullock’s Egyptian Hall, immersive landscapes at the Diorama, Poecillorama, and Cosmorama, and the novelty entertainments of The Automatons and Monsieur Louis (‘The French Giant’) at the Haymarket. More generic images of fashionable ladies at art galleries and exhibitions continued throughout 18

19

20

21

Lord Protector of England (1653–8) following the Civil War of the midseventeenth century that briefly overthrew the monarchy. Julia Petrov, ‘“Relics of Former Splendor”: Inventing the Costume Exhibition, 1833–1835’, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, 2/1 (2014), 11–28. ‘Carriage Dress’, The Repository of Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics, 13/78 (June 1815), plate 29, n.p. ‘Morning Exhibition Dress’, La Belle Assembleé, or Court and Fashionable Magazine, 3/16 (April 1826), 168.

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Figure 41.5 ‘La Mode Française’, 1888. Costume Institute Fashion Plates, 1888–90, Plate 005. Gift of Woodman Thompson, Metropolitan Museum of Art, b17520939.

the century. Figure 41.5 is a French example from 1888, showing men and women perusing art while wearing the latest styles so that the reader may examine what to wear and where to buy it. The sociologist Tony Bennett has written convincingly of the connection between the simultaneous evolution of the ordering systems for things and ideas, which he calls ‘the exhibitionary complex’: For the emergence of the art museum was closely related to that of a wider range of institutions – history and natural science museums, dioramas and panoramas, national, and later, international exhibitions, arcades and department stores – which

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displaying fashion, c. 1800–2000 served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines (history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision.22

The now-familiar style of navigation through the museal space, at once physical and intellectual, was produced largely in the nineteenth century, along with other forms of what museum historian Julia Noordegraaf calls shared ‘visual regimes’.23 Numbers of both museums and venues for shopping grew exponentially in this period, and shared some aspects of experience. Just as museums had departments organized by material or place of origin, so too had large emporiums; as objects in cases had curatorial labels, so merchandise in vitrines had price tickets and merchandise descriptors; just as a floor walker would direct customers to the correct shop department, a tour guide would explain the arrangement of artefacts in a museum gallery; and both inspired awe at the ingenuity and diversity of what humanity could produce. It is important to place the displays of both stores and museums within a further social context: colonialism.24 Museums (major and minor) were built to display the riches of empire, or to display the souvenirs brought back as a result of missionary or commercial conquest: the treasures within ripped from their indigenous contexts and reorganized within Western narratives in order to represent the far-flung colonies back to the colonizers. The wonder of the precious artefacts, and the seeming inevitability of their physical presentation distracted from the exploitation and violence that coloured their coming to be in Paris, London, Berlin, or other capitals of empire.25 Furthermore, museums and art galleries 22

23

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25

Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 333. Julia Noordegraaf, Strategies of Display: Museum Presentation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Culture (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2004). Sarah Cheang, ‘Selling China: Class, Gender and Orientalism at the Department Store’, Journal of Design History, 20/1 (2007), 1–16. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (eds.), Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998). Museums in smaller cities had collections based on the trade or travels of local people involved with colonial exploration, trade, or religious missions: see also

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educated onlookers in particular desirable behaviours – by cultivating certain kinds of connoisseurship, museum visitors were enculturated into believing that they were the pinnacle of civilization.26 Dress was not yet displayed formally in public museums, but special displays for educational and commercial purposes were put on across Europe. In September 1850, another exhibition of costume was held at the long-running Cosmorama venue in Regent Street. Unlike the historical Western fashions of Oliver Cromwell’s family, this exhibition featured three living exhibits (a ‘Kaffir, Zuloo, and Amaponda, dressed in the costumes worn by them in their Native Wilds, made from the skins of Wild Animals’), as well as articles of dress from South Africa (Figure 41.6). The description of the two men and woman in the advertisement focused on how their ethnic groups interacted with British troops and settlers in the area, as well as on the exotic nature of the animals from which their outfits were made; the outfits were described as costumes, not fashions, yet from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. every day, anyone visiting London’s first purpose-built shopping street (built in 1819, and still home to many flagship fashion stores) would view humans and outfits from the far regions of empire next door to domestic goods and surrounded by English people. The Great Exhibition, held in London in 1851, serves as a further example of the ways in which clothing, commerce, and culture mixed in this period. The aim of the Exhibition was to demonstrate the industrial and imperial advancements of the host nation (later, similar exhibitions were held in Europe and North America as Exhibitions and World’s Fairs). Goods from across Great Britain and its colonies were displayed in an enormous glass pavilion; the Exhibition was masterminded by Prince Albert, whose sovereign spouse, Queen Victoria, ceremonially opened the venue. The latest technologies, crafts, art, and commercial products were on display, including textiles and articles of dress, which were a leading

26

Kate Hill, Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Helen Rees Leahy, ‘Watch Your Step: Embodiment and Encounter at Tate Modern’, in Sandra Dudley (ed.), Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations (London: Routledge, 2010), 162–74.

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Figure 41.6 Handbill advertising a display of African tribesmen in traditional costumes at Cosmorama Rooms, Regent Street, London, 1850. Wellcome Collection, London, EPH499A.

industry for the country at the time. The Exhibition also became a fashionable event, immortalized in souvenirs like gloves and featuring as a backdrop in fashion plates.27 Figure 41.7 is a French 27

Alistair O’Neill, ‘A Display of “Articles of Clothing, for Immediate, Personal, or Domestic Use”: Fashion at the Great Exhibition’, in

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Figure 41.7 Anaïs Toudouze, ‘1687: Chapeaux de la maison’, Le Follet, 1852. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-2009-3333.

fashion plate which depicts two women at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London; while browsing the fashionable venue and its merchandise, the visitors become fashion objects themselves, as the viewer contemplates them as part of Victorian Britain’s supremacy in global trade. A further layer of fashion display is added when we consider that some of the clothing and textile items displayed at, or manufactured in connection with, the Great Exhibition are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, while this fashion plate is housed at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Later Exhibitions were more overt in Adam Geczy and Vicky Karaminas (eds.), Fashion and Art (Oxford: Berg, 2012), 189–200.

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echoing the visuality of the museum; the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris featured dresses on mannequins in glass cases by the ready-to-wear pioneering boutique Gagelin.28 Thus, shops and industrial exhibitions were structured in very similar ways in the same period. The goods gathered from global trade networks were mostly produced in physically and economically exploitative conditions, yet only their monetary cost was considered alongside their availability. While there was (and is), some media attention to the plight of workers in the fashion trades in particular, these voices were outnumbered by consumers willing to forgo ethics for indulgence.29 Likewise, the structures of shopping – the expectation of service by store staff in higher-end establishments as though any customer was an aristocrat, and the ways in which goods were presented to service ever-growing lifestyle expectations – created new middle-class norms.30 Nineteenth-century shoppers and museumgoers were part of a system of the display of power: ‘along with exhibitions and museums, the nineteenth-century department store and its concept of shopping as a leisure activity, and as a pleasure rather than a necessity, testifies to the importance of looking in a capitalist society’.31 Such spectacle and the visual pleasures of display, particularly as related to fashion, were constantly noted by cultural critics beginning in the nineteenth century.32 We must therefore see the shop and the museum vitrine as two related sites for fashion consumption.

museum mimicry: from street to gallery and back again Exhibitions of historical fashion were mounted to contextualize contemporary trends in a timeline of what came before, and to offer inspiration to improve – in aesthetics or execution – the styles 28

29

30 32

Françoise Tetart-Vittu and Gloria Groom, ‘Key Dates in Fashion and Commerce, 1851–89’, in Gloria Groom (ed.), Impressionism, Fashion & Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 273. Christopher Breward, ‘Fashion in the Age of Imperialism, 1860–1890’, in Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman, and Caroline Evans (eds.), The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk (New Haven: Yale University press, 2004), 46–59, here 48–52. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 149–50. 31 Ibid., 152. Gloria Groom, ‘Spaces of Modernity’, in Groom (ed.), Impressionism, 172–3.

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currently on offer. This is true for early exhibitions and temporary displays in the nineteenth century, and for the founding hopes of museum collections that were established in the early twentieth century. The 1874 Practical Art Exhibition held at the Palais de l’Industrie in Paris featured eleven galleries devoted to ‘a grand exhibition of the garments of the past, the Retrospective Museum of Costume’. Paris, the long-time capital of fashion, was a natural setting for such a display.33 Something like this was repeated in 1900, at the Palais du Costume at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Alongside extensive displays of modern Parisian fashion, especially haute couture, the 1900 Musée Retrospectif was a pavilion contextualizing the global dominance of the French fashion industry through royal relics, historical fashionable and folk dress, accessories, and art (Figure 41.8). Objects on display were loaned from individuals and institutions, but the twentieth century would see permanent exhibitions being established. In 1913, the London department store, Harrods, donated the historical dress collection of genre painter Talbot Hughes to the Victoria and Albert Museum,34 with the hope that ‘The collection would stimulate the imagination of the present and the future, and would help in the scheme of colour and design, which was so necessary to the dressmaker.’35 Museums with fashion collections positioned themselves as ‘laboratories’ for experimentation and inspiration, especially in America, where they collaborated closely with the producers of fashion located nearby. In 1941, the Brooklyn Museum’s Industrial Division arranged a display of hats from the museum’s historical collection: ‘The main purpose of the exhibition was to bring to the attention of millinery designers the great wealth of source material in the world-wide range of the Museum’s millinery collections.’ These artefacts were accompanied by contemporary creations forecasting future trends by renowned milliner Sally Victor: ‘They were based on the Museum’s collections, 33 34

35

Hooper, ‘The Exhibition of Costumes’, 624. Julia Petrov, ‘“The Habit of their Age”: English Genre Painters, Dress Collecting, and Museums, 1910–1914’, Journal of the History of Collections, 20/2 (2008), 237–51. ‘Old English Dress; Costume Exhibition at Harrods’, The Daily Telegraph, 22 November 1913, clipping in V&A Harrods donor file MA/1/H926.

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Figure 41.8

Le Musée Rétrospectif du Costume at the Paris Exposition Universelle, 1900. Bridgeman Images.

and showed the inspiration which a creative designer may draw from the Museum’s material in the production of modern millinery which is neither a replica nor a mere adaptation of an older form.’36 Victor had a long-standing relationship with the museum, and donated many examples of her creations between the 1940s and the 1960s; she also sent historic examples of hats and parasols from her private collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Likewise, the private Museum of Costume Art in Manhattan was conveniently located for designers at commercial firms on Fifth Avenue as well as garment manufacturers on Seventh Avenue to seek inspiration from the collections and reference library.37 This museum was incorporated into the Metropolitan 36

37

‘The Museum as Fashion Centre: Recent Activities at the Brooklyn Museum, New York’, Museums Journal, 41/5 (August 1941), 109. ‘A Brief Statement Concerning the Set-up of the Museum of Costume Art’, 14 January 1941, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives Office of the Secretary Subject Files 1870–1950, C82393: ‘Costume Art Museum 1936– 44, 1946’, 3.

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Museum of Art as the Costume Institute and, by 1958, a brochure emphasized over and over again its primary audiences: The reason for the Costume Institute . . . to stimulate the creativity of the American fashion industry . . . Located in New York City, focal point of costume design and study in America, the Costume Institute sits at the very heart of those great industries to which its services are vitally essential. It benefits all who work in the various fields of costume – fashion theatre, editorial, promotion, manufacture, merchandising, research . . . Adjoining the Study Storage is a series of designer’s rooms where professionals may work in privacy. Here is where ideas are born. . . . In this creative atmosphere, designers translate the past into tomorrow’s fashions . . . Leading internationallyknown designers use the Costume Institute regularly as a stimulus to new fashion inspiration.38

It was not just the back-of-house which was made available to the industry: the earliest displays were also designed to appeal to creatives in the garment trade. ‘Exhibitions of the new Costume Institute are arranged especially for fabric and clothing designers. The current showing, Hats and Headdresses, includes more than a hundred American and European models.’39 Museums continue to provide inspiration to this day: the British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood (1941–2022) is well known for using the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collections as a basis for her catwalk designs, for example. A continuous back-and-forth of visual references can be observed. Exhibits extolling the novelties of living designers are put on to promote local industry, thereby informing consumers of what to purchase – in effect, moving the clothes back from the museum vitrine to the street. Diana Vreeland’s 1983 Costume Institute exhibition on Yves Saint Laurent scandalized the art world by being the first display dedicated to a living designer (previous displays on operating fashion houses such as Balenciaga and Dior had focused on their deceased founders). However, despite 38

39

The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1958). ‘Costume Institute Becomes Branch of Metropolitan’, Museum News, 22/13 (1 January 1945), 1.

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the controversy, the show became a precedent for other shows created in collaboration with designers and brands.40 The Guggenheim’s Giorgio Armani retrospective, held in 2000, is still a powerful example of the clash of values between museum audiences and fashion brands. Critics were disturbed at what they felt was curatorial pandering to the commercial interests behind Armani. Fashion historian Christopher Breward wrote that ‘the overriding impression was of a glossy but ephemeral departmentstore window’,41 and arts critic Blake Gopnik called it, ‘more sales pitch than curating’.42 Today, many brands place an emphasis on their heritage (as I will discuss below) and as Armani has stood the test of time to become a recognizable fashion and lifestyle brand,43 such a display may not now meet with the same controversy. Indeed, blockbuster exhibitions about high-street and couture fashion brands have become an important part of the global museum calendar: three exhibitions about the house of Dior were touring simultaneously in 2019 alone. Apart from lionizing living designers for their oeuvre, displays on active fashion brands also draw most heavily on the commercial contexts in which the garments appear. At the Guggenheim, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramp was covered with a red carpet, and exhibition visitors became part of the promenade alongside mannequins wearing garments worn by Armani’s celebrity clients. This fantasy of being an object of the fashion gaze was also a key part of the staging of Valentino: Master of Couture at Somerset House (London) in 2012, and Hello, My Name is Paul Smith, at the Design Museum (London) in 2013; both funnelled visitors down a runway, surrounded by mannequin effigies of the prestigious people who regularly wear these designer clothes. Boutique interiors are an almost clichéd form of visual reference to the commercial contexts of fashion within a museum exhibition. In the 1960s, the Smithsonian opened a vignette of 40 41

42

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Debora Silverman, Selling Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1986). Christopher Breward, ‘Shock of the Frock’, The Guardian, 18 October 2003, p. B18. Blake Gopnik, ‘Art or Advertising?’, The Globe and Mail, 18 November 2000, p. R7. John Potvin, Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

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a Victorian dressmaker’s salon (Figure 41.9), while the Museum of Costume (now the Fashion Museum) in Bath had a lively draper’s and haberdasher’s interior to display its 1860s clothing and textiles. The 1971 V&A Fashion: An Anthology exhibition featured both Christian Dior and Biba boutique interiors to frame couture and English ready-to-wear fashions featured in the show.44 Very often, this was possible because the display designers also had a background in commercial display. The 1971 Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition was designed by Michael Haynes, a visual merchandiser for the fashion industry, and although

Figure 41.9 An 1880 satin brocade wedding gown, as displayed in the Hall of American Costume in the Museum of History and Technology, c. 1964. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95, Box 45, Folder 1.

44

Judith Clark and Amy de la Haye with Jeffrey Horsley (eds.), Exhibiting Fashion: Before and after 1971 (London: V&A Publishing, 2014).

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guest curator Cecil Beaton was anxious that ‘the exhibition should not look like shop windows, and the construction of the display area has made that effect difficult to avoid’,45 the exhibition press release promised that, with Haynes’ involvement, the show would have ‘all the originality and liveliness of the best shop windows in London’.46 Window displays that are sometimes an attraction in and of themselves are replicated for effect in museums to ‘liven things up’ and bring visual interest to a display. Retail historian Sara Schneider notes that ‘the aesthetics of museum display reflects just how similar these have grown to visualmerchandising strategies in the commercial setting . . . Many of the audiences or buyers for display are the same as those for museum exhibitions.’47 Daniel Weidmann, the chief designer for the Brooklyn Museum’s 1975 retail-inspired exhibition Of Men Only, stated: These exhibit techniques are adaptive to store windows, as well. As a matter of fact, many of my ideas come from those I have seen utilized in the windows when I stroll downtown. The only difference between my display and that of a store is that I can’t drill a hole in a shoe to put a pole through for a mannequin stand. Nor can I nail things or put pins into them to much extent because I’m dealing with museum pieces.48

Generic visual merchandising can also be targeted towards replicating brand-specific strategies: The House of Viktor and Rolf, a 2008 retrospective of the Dutch design duo staged at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, had an enormous doll’s house filled with miniature versions of the pieces on display, designed by Siebe Tettero, who was responsible for the interiors of the Viktor and Rolf boutiques in Dubai, Milan, and Moscow. The gift shop accordingly had the designer’s (full size) pieces for sale.

45 46

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P. Glynn, ‘Beaton at His Own Game’, The Times, 12 October 1971, 14. Amy de la Haye, ‘Vogue and the V&A Vitrine’, Fashion Theory, 10/1–2 (2006), 127–52, here 138. Sara K. Schneider, Vital Mummies: Performance Design for the ShowWindow Mannequin (New Haven: Yale University Press 1995), 36–7. ‘Of, But Not for Men Only’, Visual Merchandising, December 1975, 36–8, here 37.

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Indeed, with such staging, museum visitors are primed to behave in similar ways as they might within shops. Sometimes, this is permitted by the designer, as in the Yohji Yamamoto exhibition Dream Shop, at Antwerp’s MoMu, which transformed the galleries into a version of a boutique, complete with fitting rooms. Sometimes, the same effect is achieved for more pecuniary reasons, where complementary marketing in the exhibition gift shop allows visitors, who have had their fashion appetites whetted, to indulge in a sartorial souvenir: the 2017 Costume Institute exhibition Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between was accompanied by Comme des Garçons bags and t-shirts designed exclusively for the Met. At the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Oscar de la Renta exhibition (2017–18) was accompanied by a boutique stocked by the company. As John Potvin notes, ‘Fashion has transformed museums and art galleries with myriad blockbusters featuring past and living designers, and these hallowed institutions have adopted the cornerstone of fashionable goods marketing by creating desire and stimulating and fulfilling need.’49 While other motivations behind fashion exhibitions in museums certainly exist,50 the most vocal, and most financially persuasive one remains the connection to the commercial sphere. Beyond the gift shop, once a museum display goes up, shops capitalize on the content, often to support both the museum and their own bottom line. The best example of this symbiosis is the ‘Party of the Year’ held by the independently funded Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1963, the ‘Art in Fashion’ publicity campaign featured jewellery, fashion, art, and furniture from the museum’s collection in the store windows of luxury shops along fifty blocks of the luxury shopping street Fifth Avenue leading up to the museum: Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman, Van Cleef and Arpels, Henry Bendel, Bonwit Teller, Revlon, Cartier, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Lord and Taylor were among those who featured museum artefacts interspersed with their own products to ‘salute’ the museum and its upcoming benefit 49

50

John Potvin, ‘Introduction: Inserting Fashion into Space’, in Potvin (ed.), The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1–15, here 4–5. Julia Petrov, Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

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gala.51 More recently, the ‘Party of the Year’ has become a fashion event in its own right; the fashion media, particularly the chief sponsor, Vogue magazine, valorizes the content as well as the celebrity gala guests. This relationship was featured in a publication (sponsored by the New York department store Saks Fifth Avenue), documenting the exhibitions, parties, and Vogue editorial page spreads that mutually referenced each other from 2001 to 2014.52 Museums, therefore, can be a fashion destination – staging fashion shows (like the Victoria and Albert Museum’s ‘Fashion in Motion’ series), or simply lending a backdrop to magazine spreads. Responding to the growing diversity of approaches to fashion scholarship in museums, fashion curator and lecturer Fiona Anderson wrote in 2000 that ‘scholarly curatorial work must embrace an acknowledgement of the commercial character of the fashion industry’.53 She particularly highlighted the ongoing ‘Fashion in Motion’ series of catwalk presentations in the museum as a means of doing so, while at the same time enriching the modes of presentation of dress normally available to curators. The 1994 Street Style exhibition, as well as the 2000 Wear on the Street display of photographs of individuals talking about their outfits suggested to Anderson a move towards ‘wider accessibility and more democratic appeal’ in fashion curation.54 In the twenty-first century, fashion in the shop window and the museum have recombined in a new way. Increasingly, brands can leverage their company heritage by maintaining their own archives; by including museum-like displays in their flagship stores or by hiring independent curators to create travelling exhibitions, they obviate the need to compromise their brand vision through 51

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‘Fifth Avenue “Art in Fashion” windows display art of Metropolitan Museum arranged in connection with Museum’s Party of the Year for the Costume Institute’ (1963), press release, 12 November 1963. Archives, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute Publicity 1953–. Hamish Bowles, Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute: Parties, Exhibitions, People (New York: Abrams, 2014). Fiona Anderson, ‘Museums as Fashion Media’, in Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis (London: Routledge, 2000), 371–89, here 375. Ibid., 380.

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contested or critical curatorship in a public institution. Instead of questioning the ethics of their financial sponsors, scrutinizing the tendency of luxury brands to be part of large corporate conglomerates, or interrogating the supply chains of the fashion industry, such exhibitions can instead further endow luxury brands with an aura of elite status and timeless style. Some collections are being privately musealized as part of a corporate brand image strategy (Ferragamo, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, and Valentino all have stand-alone museums), while elite fashion brands like Chanel, Dior, Diane von Furstenberg, or Yves Saint Laurent can mount their own exhibitions in museums based on their extensive archives. Heritage brands (long-standing labels with existing client loyalty and widespread name recognition), according to Geczy and Karaminas, commodify their own authenticity: by packaging their associations with exclusive and ‘traditional’ lifestyles and craftsmanship, they strengthen their brand loyalty.55 The staging of their interior spaces, as well as their archival exhibitions, draws on, in Luca Marchetti’s opinion, ‘an exhibition apparatus inherited from the museum culture of the fine arts’, which ‘enabled fashion to liberate itself from some of the negative connotations commonly associated with everyday objects and allowed it to be broached through the aesthetic categories already applied to the visual arts’.56 A brand like Hermès, Chanel, Dior, or Yves Saint Laurent gains cultural legitimacy by using museal conventions in display, while enculturating consumers through the codes and biographies of their history in a more subtle way than object-specific advertising. For emerging markets, such as China, flagship stores and exhibitions explaining the cachet of a brand are an important way to build customer loyalty and reduce revenue loss through counterfeits;57 furthermore, they seek to democratize the experience of luxury, which is no longer limited to the European elite, but 55

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Adam Geczy and Vicky Karaminas, Fashion Installation: Body, Space and Performance (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 57. Luca Marchetti, ‘Fashion Curating: Ideas, Issues, and Practices’, in Luca Marchetti (ed.), Fashion Curating: Understanding Fashion through the Exhibition (Geneva: HEAD, 2016), 207–12, here 207. Kunal Sinha, ‘Connecting with the Chinese Consumer’, in Glyn Atwal and Douglas Bryson (eds.), Luxury Brands in Emerging Markets (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 135–47.

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available to anyone who might have a ticket to an exhibition or wanders into a store. Exhibitions are now also being used by nonWestern brands. Guo Pei, the first Chinese designer to be given the official designation of being haute couture, had her work promoted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, first in the 2015 China: Through the Looking Glass exhibition, and also on the red carpet as famously worn by Rihanna. Capitalizing on that interest, her couture designs were shown in a travelling exhibition that has so far stopped at Atlanta, Vancouver, and Santa Ana (California). When interviewed by The New York Times Style Magazine, Guo made it clear that the interest cultivated by the exhibition was a springboard to expand her fashion line both into lower-priced markets and into North American distribution channels.58 Shops use in-house exhibitions to attract visitors and build prestige. For historic department stores, such as the Galleries Lafayette in Paris, an ongoing exhibition programme attracts clients and firsttime tourists (many from important Asian markets seeking an authentic experience). But such exhibitions also connect to their own history which has always included cultural attractions (such as concerts or art displays) within the commercial spaces.59 The temporary exhibitions within the store’s Galerie des Galeries space are a museum within a museum: installations that challenge the boundaries of culture and commerce in a landmark venue already steeped in those traditions. In London, the historic department store, Harrods, hosts what it calls exhibitions of jewellery, watches, handbags, and houseware brands which it carries; these usually show archive pieces and new collections, while a pop-up shop retails items exclusively designed for the store. As Harrods is owned by the Qatar Investment Authority, these promotions frequently feature in Vogue Arabia, targeting that overseas luxury market.60 In North 58

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A. Mcnearney, ‘In Atlanta with Guo Pei, Who Spins Stories in Couture’, The New York Times Style Magazine (29 September 2017), www.nytimes.com/ 2017/09/29/t-magazine/fashion/guo-pei-scad-show.html (accessed 25 April 2023). E. Janssen, ‘Exhibiting Fashion in the Making’, in Marchetti (ed.), Fashion Curating, 279–82. Elisabeta Tudor, ‘Enter the Pradasphere at Harrods’, Vogue Arabia (8 April 2014), https://en.vogue.me/archive/legacy/enter-the-pradasphere-exhib ition-at-harrods-london/ (accessed 25 April 2023).

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America, exhibition maker Judith Clark was invited to stage a series of installations of historical fashion within the Bal Harbour Shops, a luxury mall in Miami; the displays increased the prestige of the mall, connecting past luxury with present possibilities for consumption. But the curatorial intention was to question whether there was a fundamental difference between what is on sale, and what is on display. Indeed, some brands make it difficult to tell: the Gucci Museum in Florence was redeveloped in early 2018 to be part of a multi-storey heritage shopping experience, including an exclusive boutique, a two-storey exhibition of archive pieces curated by wellknown international curator Maria Luisa Frisa, a gift shop and bookstore, and a restaurant. This institution becomes a head-totoe brand experience, where visitors can feed their brain, stomach, and wardrobe all at the same time. The constant references to Gucci’s past support the brand’s claims to heritage, authenticity, and value. It is important, however, to challenge the notion of the democratizing effect of ‘bringing fashion to the people’ through museum and museum-like displays. While it is tempting to claim that the price of admission or purchase can admit the public to a previously closed world of unobtainable luxury, both museums and brands remain gatekeepers of extremely entrenched cultural, social, and economic networks of capital. Introducing the dress of everyday people into galleries can certainly challenge the existing hierarchies of art in museums as being the privy of the upper classes. Hosting high-profile brand promotional events can likewise encourage connections to be made between the strange and distant historical fashions on display and the more relatable pieces to which modern consumers now aspire. The legacy of the nineteenth-century department store ensures that there is no obligation to buy if curious customers wander through the Gucci Garden Galeria, although the enchanting spectacle within is designed to tempt them to do so regardless. Yet both the museum and the store nevertheless have vested interests. Many museums have missions that explicitly promote the preservation of limited visions of art, history, and society. As previously stated, they began as (and some continue to be) colonial institutions that perpetuate entrenched social inequalities; to ensure their own survival, they court

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financial interests from a very narrow group of individuals and companies. Brands, for their part, are interested in attracting and retaining customers. The heritage mystique of the hand-crafted unique item seduces the vision away from what is a globalized, mass-market, resource-heavy, exploitative fashion system. While individuals may be attracted to an exhibition or brand display because it reflects something about their aspirations, they will nevertheless rarely see themselves on display.

the old and the new: social media and the social body The institutional authority to display is certainly being challenged. Linguistically, we see ‘the increasing use of the noun curator and the verb to curate outside the art world, where playlists, outfits, even hors d’oeuvres are now curated’.61 Cultural critic David Balzer argues that, although the contemporary meaning of the verb ‘to curate’ dates to 1982, the mid-1990s saw the rise of what he calls ‘curationism’, a cultural trend: in which institutions and businesses rely on others, often variously credentialed experts, to cultivate and organize things in an expression-cum-assurance of value and an attempt to make affiliations with, and to court, various audiences and consumers. As these audiences and consumers, we are engaged as well, cultivating and organizing our identities duly, as we are prompted.62

Balzer’s proposed timeline for this cultural shift happens to parallel the rise of the digital world, in which content could be created and shared globally. The collaborative, user-generated format of Web 2.0, which emerged in the early years of the new millennium, was particularly adaptable to selecting, gathering, and sharing appealing information and content. Curation, in the modern meaning of the term, is a form of self-expression in the sense that it is a paradigm for meaning-making by which we can navigate the flood of superfluous goods that have become our natural habitat. 61

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David Balzer, Curationism: How Curating Took over the Art World and Everything Else (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2014), 7. Ibid., 9.

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The seemingly limitless landscape of the early Internet led to the proliferation of websites which collected and shared materials that were previously only available in person. SHOWstudio, founded in 2000,63 was a pioneering platform in that it could be a clearinghouse of commercial and experimental design and critique, not bounded by physical geography or time, collecting and archiving fashion content as it happened. As a collaborative form of digital display, it emerged in a time of street style documentation (for example, Scott Schuman’s ‘Sartorialist’ blog, established 2005)64 and Web 2.0, taking advantage of both the increasing populism of fashion and the responsiveness of the available technology. However, it remains an essentially top-down communication medium, where producers and critics have a voice, but viewers take a more passive consumer role. A further step towards the democratization of display came with the rise of microblogging platforms and digital scrapbooks. The clarification of copyright law enabled the easier sharing of images, and the ability to remix that media for creative purposes. In a digital scrapbook, whether on open platforms like Pinterest, or institutionally circumscribed ones like Rijksstudio (run by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), individuals can make their own collections, organizing them along visual or verbal categories of often very personal meaning. Truly user-generated content, however, has its place on social media. Documenting and displaying personal style, whether through YouTube tutorials, or Instagram videos, stories, and posts, content can be easily shared and found through the use of user-generated tags that enable searching. Anyone – from an individual sharing with real-life friends, to influencers with millions of followers – can promenade in their finery by posting a selfie, or an ‘outfit of the day’ (#OOTD). This is a natural extension of the way fashion circulates in everyday life, as Banim, Green, and Guy point 63

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Alice Beard, ’Show and Tell: An Interview with Penny Martin, Editor in Chief of SHOWstudio’, Fashion Theory, 12/2 (2008), 181–95. Although Bill Cunningham’s photo essays of street style began appearing in The New York Times in the late 1970s, the limited geographical range and readership of these makes them a model for, but not a parallel to, the online versions of the early millennium.

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out: ‘Women assembling their wardrobes are also constructing identities or selves, packaging some selves for public consumption and reserving other, more personal identities for private spaces.’65 The dominant discursive space for displaying social aspiration through fashion is now the digital world. In a sense, a #OOTD Instagram can be considered a museum of fashion: fashion influencers display their own personal fashion brands. But they also curate themselves as the content, and leave behind an archive of images. Like the women in Figure 41.2, we watch them engaging with the fashion system, and are engaged ourselves. Through the interplay between being a personal statement of self and a representation of the social body, fashion becomes part of a pattern of historical change. The additional visibility provided by the medium to queer, disabled, outsized, and non-white bodies challenges long-established colonial relationships of aesthetics and capital that are still painfully dominant in physical stores and museums.66 While anyone could conceivably create a fashion blog, not all will gain the monetization that brand sponsorship and gifts provide. Influencers, the new fashion royalty, exist for a new generation of digital flâneurs, who scroll through content like their predecessors strolled by the shop windows of Paris. But this museum remains without a physical incarnation. While the museum has seen stagings of street style exhibits (from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s eponymous 1994 show to Punk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013), at the time of writing, museums had not yet relayed the digital influencer wardrobe into their galleries for a physical up-close view. Despite the visual similarities with other fashion media, perhaps the cultural capital of the museum does render it a different kind of institution, with a related, but different content strategy. Rather, digital fashion display remains closer to its commercial forebears. Elyssa Dimant draws a straight line from the fantasy world of the 65

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Ali Guy, Eileen Green, and Maura Banim, Through the Wardrobe: Women’s Relationships with Their Clothes (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 257. Ian S. Fairweather, ‘Colonialism and the Museum’, in H. Callan (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell, 2018), 1–6.

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nineteenth-century department store to the online shopping marketplace, writing: ‘The frantic cycle of fashion consumption birthed by nineteenth century development has reached its frenzy through digital incarnations of the specialty clerk, color and moving image advertisements, the promotional sale, and the enlivened display.’67 Instagram exists as a closed loop, where an influencer can be paid to display fashion in the context of their lifestyle, a follower can purchase said product, and share their own integration of it on their personal social media feed by sharing appropriately ‘hashtagged’ photos.

conclusion The rise of e-commerce and social media threatened to destroy traditional fashion spaces, yet David Gilbert wrote in 2000 that: within the fashion process itself are elements that are resistant to the standardisation and control of the spaces of consumption, or their substitution by the virtual spaces of the web. Perhaps the most important of these features is the importance of fashion as an experience, rather than as a disembodied and unplaced act of consumer choice and purchase.68

Indeed, the advent of the social web, where one can share the experience of consumption (leaving a ‘like’ reaction on something you have scrolled past, sharing a recent purchase on Facebook, or compiling your own museum of looks on Pinterest) is perhaps a more experiential process, or at least one about the experiencing of an image, independently or with friends. After all, this is what modernity is all about: just as modernism ‘turned away from the illusion of naturalism and realism, and stated that a painting was just that: a flat representation, not a three-dimensional reflection of the “real”’,69 so must we remember that the pleasure of 67

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Elyssa Dimant, ‘From “Paradise” to Cyberspace: The Revival of the Bourgeois Marketplace’, in Potvin (ed.), The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 232–46, here 244. David Gilbert, ‘Urban Outfitting: The City and the Spaces of Fashion Culture’, in Bruzzi and Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures, 7–24, here 10. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 62.

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consuming the spectacle of fashion display is in its nature as an image – it is not the real and we can therefore safely indulge our fantasies. In reifying the spectacle of fashion, however, we can remake the world in our own image. Fashion is aspirational; its display is linked to an ever-growing desire for self-representation as signalled by clothes. Both the fashion system and modern capitalist society are fuelled by the human desire to participate and excel among peers.70 It is not a coincidence that the growth in the display of fashion occurred at the same time as traditional social structures changed to enable advancement through consumption rather than by birth. Store displays are part of the aspirational fantasy on which the fashion system is built, and the later invention of displaying fashion in museums created a canonical attitude to the centrality of fashion in modern society. As these Western norms spread beyond Europe, fashion display has become part of the universal language of consumption, reflecting a desirable version of consumers to themselves. With the advent of social media, individual consumers, brands, and museum institutions have created a parallel space for digital dress display, one which goes beyond the physical architecture of European capital cities, and underlines the continuing importance of fashion and adornment in human society, but is nevertheless colonized by Western standards of aesthetic appeal, commercial capital, and heritage.

select bibliography Anderson, Fiona, ‘Museums as Fashion Media’, in Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis (London: Routledge, 2000), 371–89. Barringer, Tim and Tom Flynn (eds.), Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998). Bennett, Tony, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).

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Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2002), 20.

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julia petrov Breward, Christopher and Caroline Evans (eds.), Fashion and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2005). de la Haye, Amy, ‘Vogue and the V&A Vitrine’, Fashion Theory, 10/1–2 (2006), 127–52. Groom, Gloria, Impressionism, Fashion & Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Hill, Kate, Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Marchetti, Luca (ed.), Fashion Curating: Understanding Fashion through the Exhibition (Geneva: HEAD, 2016). Matthews David, Alison, ‘Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin’, Fashion Studies, 1/1 (2018), 1–46. Noordegraaf, Julia, Strategies of Display: Museum Presentation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Culture (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2004). Parkins, Ilya, ‘Fashion as Methodology: Rewriting the Time of Women’s Modernity’, Time & Society, 19/1 (2010), 98–119. Petrov, Julia, Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). Potvin, John (ed.), The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007 (London: Routledge, 2009). Schneider, Sara K., Vital Mummies: Performance Design for the ShowWindow Mannequin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Wilson, Elizabeth, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. Revised and updated edition (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).

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FASHION AND GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY lucy norris

introduction How might we reimagine fashion as a regenerative force, one that can help to fundamentally reshape our relationships to each other, the environment, and the future of the world we share? If fashion is broken, can we fix it?1 Attitudes are shifting, but more radical systemic changes to the global fashion system are urgently needed. Fashion is a significant contributor to the impact we are having on the earth’s planetary boundaries.2 Fashion also fails to provide the social and economic foundations needed to support human flourishing to many of the 300 million workers in global garment supply chains.3 This crisis affects us all. This chapter takes the current impact of the global fashion industry as its starting point. It draws on academic research and published sources from industry, designers, and international and non-governmental organizations. It explores the sustainable

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Lidewij Edelkoort, ‘Anti-Fashion: A Manifesto for the Next Decade. Ten Reasons Why the Fashion System Is Obsolete’ (Trend Union, 2015); Josie Warden, ‘Fashion Is Broken: Where Can It Go from Here?’, www.thersa.org/blog/2019/ 09/fashion-is-broken-where-can-it-go-from-here (accessed 25 April 2023). Will Steffen et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet’, Science, 347/6223 (13 February 2015). Ellen MacArthur Foundation, ‘A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future (Updated 1-12-17)’ (2017), www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/publica tions (accessed 25 April 2023); Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (White River Junction, VT: Random House Business, 2017).

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strategies various actors are currently pursuing, largely framed by circular economy concepts. It then goes beyond these to explore alternative approaches that reject the underpinnings of a globalized fashion system entirely. At its heart, the concept of sustainability brings together societal and environmental development and includes both intra- and intergenerational justice.4 The essential needs of the global poor must take priority, and the environment’s capacity to meet current and future needs is limited by both technological and societal conditions. In 2015 the United Nations set seventeen Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved by 2030. In order to play its part, the fashion industry must make system-wide changes fast, but what the most effective strategies are for an industry rooted in global capitalism is highly contested. Put simply, could the industry shift from one depending upon maximizing profit from a global extractive economy, to one that aligns the value of fashion with core human values, investing in becoming part of the solution to create a regenerative economy, that puts the health of the planet first in order to create a basis for humanity to thrive? The mechanization of textile production was at the vanguard of the First Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America; social reformers in the mid-nineteenth century pointed to the appalling working conditions in textile factories that eventually spurred the growth of the organized labour movement.5 The links between public health and air pollution from coal-fired steam engines were investigated in Britain as early as 1829, while in the mid-nineteenth century authorities were aware that the new synthetic dyes poisoned rivers and groundwater.6 The rise of mass production at the turn of the twentieth century, the theory of 4

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Sustainable development was defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Frederich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, trans. Florence Kelly (New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1887). www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/oct/28/jmw-turner-air-pollutionin-art-rain-steam-and-speed (accessed 25 May 2020); Anthony S. Travis, ‘Poisoned Groundwater and Contaminated Soil: The Tribulations and Trial of the First Major Manufacturer of Aniline Dyes in Basel’, Environmental History, 2/3 (1997), 343–65.

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planned obsolescence as a means to regenerate industries, and the consumption boom following the thriftiness practised during the Second World War, all changed the way in which fashion was valued.7 By the 1960s, the devastating impact industrialization (including cotton production) was having on the wider environment, coupled with the rise of the civil rights movement, led to the growing recognition that the wider fashion system was a major contributor to social and ecological injustice, and countercultural fashion became a highly visible means of protest.8 However, it has arguably been the consequences of the rise of fast fashion that have prompted increasing public awareness of the damage the contemporary fashion industry is wreaking. With the rapid globalization of the 1980s, clothing manufacturing moved to developing countries to take advantage of cheap labour costs and multi-tiered complex global supply chains were formed where governance structures were increasingly hard to trace.9 By the end of the 1980s, fashion activists such as Katherine Hamnett began to research their own supply chains and publicly highlight the direct links between fashion, pollution, and sweatshop labour in developing economies. As the production of fast fashion has increased, it has been a growing cohort of fashion activists who have experimented with alternative business models and sustainable strategies, and supported an alternative ecosystem of journalists, fashion shows, and new communication channels to make their voices heard by global brands, governments, and consumers alike.10 7

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Bernard London, Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence (New York: self-published, 1932). Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005); Gary Gereffi, John Humphrey, and Timothy Sturgeon, ‘The Governance of Global Value Chains’, Review of International Political Economy 12/1 (2005), 78–104. Notable publications include Kate Fletcher, Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys (London: Earthscan, 2008); Hazel Clark, ‘SLOW + FASHION – an Oxymoron – or a Promise for the Future?’, Fashion Theory, 12/4 (2008), 427–46; Kate Fletcher and Lynda Grose, Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change (London: Lawrence King, 2012); Tansy Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion (London: Pluto Press, 2014); Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham (eds.),

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The climate crisis and evident social injustices have now made the global nature of the problem clear, with tackling the fashion system now rising up international political agendas (see below). At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the inflexibility and vulnerability of fashion producers’ highly optimized global supply chains. Brands were left with mountains of unsold stock as retail stores closed, and orders were quickly cancelled, threatening millions of job losses among garment workers across Asia. This chapter starts with the current crisis, discussing the impact of materials and processes on the environment, and the lack of rights and livelihoods across the globe. It moves on to the role of transparency in tackling human rights abuses, issues of governance, and grassroots perspectives. It then examines the transition to a circular economy as a strategy to sustainably manage the circular flow of materials, from fibre choice and waste prevention to the development of recycling technologies. Extending clothing’s lifetime through incorporating sharing, renting, resale, repair, and remanufacturing services are critical elements in emerging brand strategies, but can also be revived in domestic practices that challenge the role of the market in providing solutions. The subsequent section introduces the concept of biomimetic fashion cycles, and looks at the potential of biodesign for material sustainability. The concluding section looks at regenerative visions for the fashion system, highlighting critical perspectives that centre upon our personal and cultural relationships to clothing, and the possibility of integrating human social well-being into the heart of a new relationship between fashion and nature.11

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Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). Well-documented human rights abuses, environmental pollution, and animal welfare issues exist in associated industries such as the mining of precious metals and gemstones, and the fur and leather industries. Their integration into fashion supply chains is comprehensively reported in Lucy Siegle, To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing out the World? (London: Fourth Estate, 2011).

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the crisis in fashion A recent study estimates that approximately 50 billion units of clothing were produced in 2000, doubling to 100 billion in 2015.12 In the same period, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) found that utilization rates by consumers dropped by 36 per cent, with rates much lower in high-income countries; some garments were discarded after just seven to ten wears.13 Clothing consumption is projected to rise by 63 per cent between 2017 and 2030.14 A survey of British consumers in 2017 found that ‘One in seven consider it a fashion faux-pas to be photographed in an outfit twice. Simply put, young people today crave newness.’15 These photographs circulate in a highly pressured social media environment, raising the question – how can these trends be reconciled with growing consumer demands for sustainability?16 In 2015, the Circular Fibres Initiative estimated the global flow of materials during clothing’s production, use, and end-of-life, which clearly demonstrated the ‘take, make, and dispose’ nature of the linear system of material extraction and use.17 Looking at the fibre inputs and outputs from the fashion system as a whole, they found that garments were produced from an input of over 97 per cent virgin feedstock (materials entering the production system) comprised 63 per cent synthetics, 26 per cent cotton, and 11 per cent other fibres. Less than 2 per cent were recycled feedstock from other industries, and less than 1 per cent comprised closed-loop recycling within the textile industry. The end-of-life scenarios for fibres lost to the overall system was bleak, including waste during production (12 per cent), 12

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Ellen MacArthur Foundation, ‘A New Textiles Economy’, 18. (This chapter cites statistics published in a wide range of reports. However, the scientific methodologies behind the collection and analysis of data are rarely documented in detail, so they should only be interpreted as trend indicators.) Ibid., 19. Global Fashion Agenda, ‘Pulse of the Fashion Industry’ (Copenhagen: Global Fashion Agenda & The Boston Consulting Group, 2017), www .globalfashionagenda.com/publications-and-policy/pulse-of-the-industry/ (accessed 25 April 2023). The Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Company, ‘The State of Fashion 2018’ (2017), www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/state-offashion. Global Fashion Agenda, ‘Pulse’. Ellen MacArthur Foundation, ‘A New Textiles Economy’, 20.

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microplastics shed through washing by users, and downcycling into other industries (11 per cent). Three-quarters of all clothing was either directly thrown out by consumers as rubbish or passed through domestic and international second-hand markets to be eventually burned, buried, or openly dumped.18 To produce these quantities, the textile industry relies upon using increasing amounts of non-renewable and toxic resources including oil, fertilizers, chemicals, and water.19 Greenhouse gas emissions are set to comprise fully 26 per cent of the world’s carbon budget by 2050.20 Fast fashion is predicated upon the use of ‘cheap’ fossil fuels, and it is predicted that this will continue to rise.21 The use of hazardous chemicals as primary ingredients or unwanted residues harms both human health and the environment into which they are discharged; toxic chemicals can be persistent and are bio-accumulative.22 More than half of garment workers in countries such as India and the Philippines are not paid minimum wages (for women it can be as high as 87 per cent), while these minimums are at best half of what are considered to be living wages.23 In 2019, the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) produced a report detailing findings from labour activists, workers’ rights organizations, and journalists on issues such as child labour, excessive overtime, violence, sexual harassment, and poverty wages in garment factories across Asia. It concluded that brand-led social compliance initiatives and social audits failed to address these issues.24 Compliance is pushed down 18

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Madeleine Cobbing and Yannick Vicaire, Fashion-at-the-Crossroads: A Review of Initiatives to Slow and Close the Loop in the Fashion Industry (Hamburg: Greenpeace, 2017), www.greenpeace.org/inter national/publication/fashion-at-the-crossroads/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Ellen MacArthur Foundation, ‘A New Textiles Economy’, 20. Ibid., 21. Synthetics are set to rise to 73 per cent of all fashion fibres, of which 85 per cent will be polyester. Changing Markets Foundation, Fossil Fashion: The Hidden Reliance of Fast Fashion on Fossil Fuels (Utrecht: Changing Markets Foundation, February 2021). Greenpeace International, Toxic Threads: The Big Fashion Stitch-up (Amsterdam: Greenpeace, 2012). Global Fashion Agenda, ‘Pulse’, 14. Clean Clothes Campaign, ‘Figleaf for Fashion: How Social Auditing Protects Brands and Fails Workers’ (2019), https://cleanclothes.org/file-repository/ figleaf-for-fashion-brief.pdf (accessed 25 April 2023).

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to the level of supplying factories, while ignoring the impact of brands’ own purchasing practices, design, and sourcing decisions on those suppliers. Supplier assessments are carried out by a handful of highly profitable global auditing firms paid for by the businesses themselves, and auditors are orientated towards mitigating reputational risk. The system is rife with conflicts of interest, lacks transparency, and is weak on detecting, documenting, reporting, and remedying human rights violations. The report concludes that secrecy surrounding audit reports contributes to violations by obstructing, delaying, or undermining alternative more effective methodologies, and conceals the underlying power imbalances and industry practices which underpin them. The months between September 2012 and April 2013 are highlighted as ‘the most deadly in the history of the globalised garment industry’.25 On 11 September 2012, the Ali Enterprises factory in Pakistan burned down, killing 250 workers and injuring hundreds more. Fire escapes were found to be locked, windows blocked, fire alarms broken, and the insufficient exits barred by bales of garments, in breach of both social compliance codes and Pakistani law. Just three weeks earlier, local subcontractors working for global auditors had credited the Ali Enterprises factory with the international social accountability certification SA8000. On 24 April 2013, the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,134 workers with several thousand more injured. Housing five factories working for up to thirty international brands, the building had had extra floors added on top, and had not been designed to hold heavy machinery. The disaster became a globally distributed symbol of the devastating multiple human rights failings in the industry, exacerbated by the reports that the Rana Plaza building had also been inspected by several leading auditing firms in the preceding months (Figure 42.1). The CCC calls for binding international regulation, the threat of sanctions, the performance of due diligence and the protection of workers’ lives, and the development of credible, transparent models for factory inspections.

25

Ibid., 56.

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Figure 42.1 A mourner grieves for her missing relative during the one hundredth-day anniversary of the collapse of the Rana Plaza building on 24 April 2013, Dakar, Bangladesh. MUNIR UZ ZAMAN / AFP via Getty Images.

transparency The globalization of the fashion industry has resulted in the prioritization of price points, quality, and ever shorter delivery times over human rights and sustainability criteria: ‘It has created a governance and regulatory gap.’26 Confidentiality of contracts makes it challenging to identify which factories produce for which brands and under what conditions. Companies avoid revealing lists of suppliers, and purchasing and pricing strategies, while agents are afraid to disclose subcontracting arrangements. The CCC concludes that these practices have a direct impact upon the capacity of suppliers to pay living wages. Transparency is a powerful tool to enable actors to publicly share information about each other up and down the supply chain, exposing corruption and environmental abuses, and facilitating collective action

26

Ibid., 78.

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against labour abuses by allowing workers’ organizations to directly contact international brands.27 Fashion Revolution (FR) is a UK based activist organization that has put transparency at the heart of its global grassroots activism. Through its social media campaign, #WhoMadeMyClothes, FR urges consumers to pose the question, and garment factory workers to respond with photos tagged #IMadeYourClothes (Figure 42.2). As FR illustrates, a lack of transparency costs lives: When the Rana Plaza factory collapsed . . . people had to dig through the rubble looking for clothing labels in order to figure out which brands were producing clothes there. It is impossible for companies to make sure human rights are respected, working conditions are adequate and the environment is safeguarded without knowing where their products are being made.28

FR’s Fashion Transparency Index assesses how much information brands disclose.29 The report reviews and ranks over 250 global brands on 220 indicators, including animal welfare, biodiversity, due diligence, forced labour, freedom of association, gender equality, living wages, purchasing practices, supplier disclosure, and waste and recycling. In 2020, the overall score for the industry was 23 per cent transparency across all indicators, with more than half scoring less than 20 per cent.30 Adequate reporting must be linked to an obligation to actually do human rights due diligence.31 The CCC identify the need for international legislative frameworks for non-financial reporting across (i) countries where brands have their headquarters, (ii) countries where garments are produced, (iii) for brands and retailers, and (iv) for the suppliers and manufacturers themselves. At the top

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United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (Geneva: United Nations, 2011). www.fashionrevolution.org/about/transparency/ (accessed 1 February 2021). Fashion Revolution, Fashion Transparency Index 2020 (London: Fashion Revolution, April 2020). High-street brands scored the highest, with H&M at 73%, C&A at 70%, Adidas and Reebok at 69%, and Esprit at 64%. Luxury brand Gucci scored 48%, with further Kering brands Balenciaga and Saint Laurent at 47%. Clean Clothes Campaign, ‘Position Paper on Transparency’ (October 2020), www.cleanclothes.org (accessed 25 April 2023).

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Figure 42.2

Fibre growers, spinners, weavers, and garment workers take part in Fashion Revolution’s #WhoMadeYourClothes? social media campaign. Image courtesy of Fashion Revolution.

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level, the European Union, United Kingdom, France, Australia, and the Netherlands have introduced due diligence or modern slavery laws. But producing countries have not followed, brands and retailers do not satisfactorily report on corporate social impacts, and suppliers have also not yet complied. One solution is the Open Apparel Registry (OAR), an open source tool that maps garment facilities worldwide, creating a unique identifier code for each, and populating a database linking facilities into brands’ supply chains.32 Wage protests by workers in Bangladesh in late 2018, for example, were met with violence and led to thousands of workers being fired, blacklisted, or charged with criminal activities by Bangladeshi factory owners.33 Where international brands had signed up to the OAR, they were able to identify their own suppliers and pressure them to drop charges, and similarly workers were able to see which brands they were supplying and appeal to them directly, thus bypassing local power structures. Brands based in the Global North also leverage social and economic inequalities within wealthier nations and trading blocs to cut costs. A study of garment manufacturers in Eastern Europe working for German brands revealed that the largely female workforce did not earn a living wage, could not join unions, and did not have secure livelihoods.34 The Ethical Trading Initiative found that 90 per cent of garment factories in Leicester, United Kingdom, paid as little as £3 per hour to a workforce drawn largely from South Asian and Eastern European migrants, often with poor language skills. Those who lacked the right to work or stay in the United Kingdom were paid as little as £1 per hour, working in squalid conditions inside hazardous buildings.35 Government and law enforcement agencies are apparently unable to comprehensively tackle these abuses.

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https://openapparel.org/ (accessed 25 May 2021). Clean Clothes Campaign, ‘Position Paper’, 8. Clean Clothes Campaign Germany and Brot für die Welt, Exploitation: Made in Europe (April 2020), www.cleanclothes.org. Nikolaus Hammer et al., New Industry on a Skewed Playing Field: Supply Chain Relations and Working Conditions in UK Garment Manufacturing. Focus Area – Leicester and the East Midlands (Leicester: University of Leicester, Centre for Sustainable Work and Employment Futures, 2015).

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Grassroots initiatives seek to counter the failure of social auditing regimes to capture the lived experience of garment workers and highlight the real disconnect between standards set by those in power and workers’ livelihoods. Internationally agreed social standards often fail to take into account complex cultural perspectives, their intersection with local politics and power structures, and how different actors adopt strategies to secure their own agency. Longterm anthropological studies in South India, for example, show how imposing international codes and standards can ‘generate new social regimes of power and inequality’.36 Furthermore, transparency initiatives rarely reach beyond the level of suppliers’ factories, leaving the precarity of homeworkers’ lives largely invisible.37 Entrepreneurs who run smaller sustainable fashion businesses often build up their knowledge of local cultures through long-term relationships with artisans, which inform their ethical and sustainable choices. Selling through networks supporting small businesses, thousands of fashion designers choose to maintain close relationships with their producers. They promote a more nuanced understanding of sustainable development from a culturally informed perspective, working with local possibilities to enact wider changes. Safia Minney, who founded ethical clothing brand People Tree in 1991, is a pioneer of developing fair trade and ethical supply chains, grounded in her experience of supporting local, community-based slow fashion in Japan and South Asia.38 For many entrepreneurs, developing a sustainable fashion business from scratch entails questioning the goals of growth, competition, and pressure that underpin contemporary commercial practices, rethinking the fundamental value of work to everyone in the business, and drawing on inspiration from alternative economic models to reimagine radical futures.39 36

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Geert de Neve, ‘Power, Inequality and Corporate Social Responsibility: The Politics of Ethical Compliance in the South Indian Garment Industry’, Economic and Political Weekly, 44/22 (May 2009), 63–71. See https://traidcraftexchange.org/project-hidden-homeworkers (accessed 24 February 2021). Safia Minney, Slow Fashion: Aesthetics Meets Ethics (Oxford: New Internationalist, 2016). Naomi Ryland and Lisa Jaspers, Starting a Revolution: What We Can Learn from Female Entrepreneurs about the Future of Business (Berlin: Naomi Ryland & Lisa Jaspers GmbH, 2019).

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circular fashion The circular economy (CE) concept is based on the cradle-to-cradle principle of eco-effectiveness, where waste is designed out of the system, and materials circulate in either technical or biological cycles, powered by renewable energy.40 In biological cycles, renewable bio-based materials are conceived as nutrients designed to feed back into the natural system through composting and anaerobic digestion, regenerating living systems. Technical cycles are based upon the use of finite resources, such as minerals and fossil fuels, where the imperative is to recover and restore products, components, and materials through strategies such as reuse, repair, remanufacture, or recycling back into their basic components. The EMF identifies four building blocks: design for circularity, new business models, reverse cycles, and enabling mechanisms.41 Circular design skills to support the reuse, recycling, and cascading of products depend upon material selection, standardization of components, durability, and ease of disassembly, as well as wider systems thinking that cascades manufacturing by-products into other industries. While design innovation is likely to be powered by entrepreneurs, EMF claims that brands dealing in large volumes across global supply chains are able to develop innovative business models that scale up these innovations. Reverse logistics includes collecting, sorting, and transporting end-of-life goods in order to feed them back into a circular system. The following sections delve further into some of these components of a circular system. Raw material choices have a huge impact on sustainability, from the way in which they are produced to their potential for future recyclability. Collaborations of brands, researchers, and start-ups are prototyping technologies to build effective new materials systems, while continuing to make existing production models more efficient. However, the metrics used to calculate the impact of fibres are controversial. Using the Higg Materials Sustainability Index, an influential industry report ranked the overall 40

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W. Braungart and M. McDonough, Cradle to Cradle: Rethinking the Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002). www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/concept/buildingblocks (accessed 8 February 2021).

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environmental impact of materials, based upon abiotic resource depletion, eutrophication of water bodies, contribution to global warming, and water scarcity.42 By focusing only on production rather than taking use and end-of-life scenarios into account, the report concluded that leather and natural fibres have the highest environmental impact, and that recycling synthetics already in circulation could replace virgin materials, requiring less energy overall to produce.43 It advocated for replacing conventional cotton with polyester and developing cheaper, more efficient polyester recycling technologies.44 In 2017, Textile Exchange challenged over fifty global brands to increase their use of recycled polyester (rPET) to 25 per cent by 2020; by 2018 they had already achieved 36 per cent.45 For example, Adidas has partnered with Parley for the Oceans since 2015 to recycle plastic bottles and waste collected from beaches and coastal regions, and will replace virgin polyester with recycled in all of its products by 2024. But increasing the use of recycled polyester is controversial, not least because of the urgency of the problem.46 Transforming singleuse plastic bottles into clothing relies upon an unsustainable feedstock, and until universal post-consumer clothing collection schemes are in place, these materials will not feed back into the fashion system.47 Current mechanical recycling processes degrade the product, requiring the addition of virgin materials to strengthen the fibres, while chemical recycling still suffers from a loss of quality. Critics of the strategy point to its dependence on future technologies to effectively close synthetic material loops,

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Global Fashion Agenda, ‘Pulse’. Ibid., 41. It acknowledges that different methods of cotton cultivation can significantly reduce water use. Chemically recycling nylon is technologically achievable without significant loss of quality: Aquafil produces its regenerated Econyl nylon yarn from old carpets, pre-consumer waste, and the 700,000 tonnes of fishing nets lost annually; it is used in swimwear, underwear, and outdoor wear, but its handle and feel is unsuitable for many fashion garments. https://textileexchange.org/recycled-polyester-commitment/ (accessed 15 February 2021). Marjorie van Elven, ‘How Sustainable Is Recycled Polyester?’ (15 November 2018), https://fashionunited.uk/news/fashion/how-sustainableis-recycled-polyester/2018111540000 (accessed 25 April 2023). Ibid.

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and the failure to tackle microplastic leakage during the washing of fleece clothing, one of main items made from rPET.48 After synthetics, conventional cotton is the most widely used fashion fibre, resulting in the overuse of pesticides and fertilizers in crop production, unsustainable water consumption and land degradation, underpinned by unethical labour relationships. In 2015, Levi’s assessed that a pair of their jeans used 3,700 litres of water over its lifetime, of which 2,000 was in the growing and manufacturing phases. Cultivation contributed to phosphorous run-off contaminating water bodies, leading to the overgrowth of algae and plankton.49 The development of their Water