Fashion History Read online

  Figure 7.1

  Detail from “Ladies of the Palace.” Color woodcut on silk, ca. 1980. Copy of painting by Zhen Fang (ca. 720–800 CE). bpk, Berlin / Museum fuer Ostasiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany. Peter Garbe / Art Resource, NY. This first millennium image of a lady with flowers and jewels in her hair shows a finely composed maquillage including a small lip style emphasizing a four-petal shape in the central lip area and an eyebrow style evocative of insect wings.

  Figure 7.2

  Chinese Lip Fashions. Illustration by Fafar Bayat. In China, makeup was used to mask the natural lip and emphasize a variety of fashionable shapes over time.

  Figure 7.3

  Detail from “Portrait of the First Imperial Concubine,” China, reign of Qianlong (r. 1736–96). Qing dynasty. Gouache, 55.2 x 41.2 cm. Inv. MG26588. Musée des Arts Asiatique-Guimet, Paris, France. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. The lip design in this portrait straightened and lowered the top of the upper lip from the natural lip line.

  Figure 7.4

  Detail from “Women feeding silkworms on mulberry leaves.” Anonymous. Nineteenth century. Chinese tempura painting on rice paper. Ann Ronan Picture Library London, Great Britain. HIP / Art Resource, NY. The lower lip of this silk laborer is colored red only in the center.

  Figure 7.5

  “Manchu Ladies Peking,” 1868–72. Photograph by John Thomson. Wellcome Library, London. Licensed by Creative Commons. License available online: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The seated woman, who is of Han ethnicity, shows her bound feet shod in embroidered silk shoes. The two standing ladies illustrate Manchu hairdressing. Thomson wrote, “I confess myself unable to explain the mysterious mode in which the tresses have been twisted, but careful study of the illustrations will, I doubt not, reward any lady who may desire to dress her hair ‘à la Manchu.’”

  Figure 7.6

  “Amoy Woman,” 1869, Shanghai. Photograph by John Thomson. Wellcome Library, London. Licensed by Creative Commons. License available online: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Black velvet snoods became fashionable in China shortly after machine-woven velvet fabric appeared in the marketplace.

  Figure 7.7

  “Mindo.” Joseon Dynasty. Scroll painting on silk, probably mid-nineteenth century. Attributed to Young Yun. Gosan Yunseondo Artifact Museum, Haenam City, Jeolla Province, Korea. By permission of Hyungsik Yun. “Mindo” means “portrait of a beauty.” She is donning an elaborate wig, a fashion that became popular in the eighteenth century.

  Figure 7.8

  “Oiran in Summer Kimono.” Attributed to Hosoda Eishi, Japan. Eighteenth / early nineteenth century. Scroll painting on silk. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 54.37.3 Oiran were courtesans of the highest rank in Japan’s pleasure quarters. They were widely watched for their fashion. Here the courtesan wears a summer kimono with wide sleeves that is partially open in the front.

  Figure 7.9

  “Premonition of a Storm.” 1750–60. Indian miniature, Guler School. British Museum. Scala / Art Resource, NY.The male in this Indian miniature wears a superfine muslin jama (tunic) over yellow payjama pants. The woman wears a red choli (blouse) and multicolored ghaghra (skirt) with a sheer dupatta (scarf), plus numerous jewelry items.

  Figure 7.10

  Studio portrait of Hamengku Buwono VII, sultan of Yogyakarta. Kassian Céphas, albumin print. 1880–91. By permission of the Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen. Coll. no. TM-60001455. Reproduced by permission. The sultan’s wrapper called kain panjang shows the parang rusak batik motif. This parang motif once was restricted to the royal court and the large-sized version was the sultan’s alone. By the late nineteenth century, women’s fashion sarongs incorporated the parang, even the parang rusak.

  Figure 8.1

  Les voeux du paon, fol. 25v. Jacques, de Longuyan. Belgium, probably Tournai, ca. 1350. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MS G.24. Gift of the Trustees of the William S. Glazier Collection, 1984. This miniature shows young men wearing the latest fashion—short tunics and hoods with dagged edges—about the time some dress scholars claim that fashion started in Europe.

  Figure 8.2

  Head of Vibia Matidia (85–165 CE). Flavian dynasty, Imperial age. Marble. Musei Capitolini, Rome, Italy. G. Dagli Orti. ©DeA Picture Library / Art Resource. In the Flavian hairstyle, the hair is separated into front and back sections. The front curls required a vertical support.

  Figure 8.3

  Bust of Julia Domna (d. 217 CE), called “Plutilla,” second wife of Emperor Septimus Severus. Severan dynasty, Roman imperial age. Marble. MA 1103. Jean Schormans. Musée de Louvre, Paris. ©Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. In the Severan dynasty, Empress Julia Domna wore a thick waved wig. A strand of her own hair shows by her ear.

  Figure 8.4

  Photograph of a bridal couple, Attica, Greece, 1878. Photograph: Private Collection. Copied with permission during field research. This couple, both from prominent local families in the village of Spata, wear the bridal attire popular in the Messoghia villages of Attica in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Men had adopted the skirted attire of Albanian fighters who aided the Greeks in their quest for freedom from the Ottoman Turks.

  Figure 8.5

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

  Figure 9.1

  Queen Ka’ahumanu, 1816. Original artwork by Louis Choris. Reproduced photographically by J. J. Williams with charcoal work by J. Ewing. Courtesy of Hawai’i State Archives, Digital Collection, PP-96-6-004. The Hawaiian queen is wearing a wrapped skirt of bark cloth.

  Figure 9.2

  “Portrait of Lucy Muolu Moehonua,” ca. 1853. Daguerreotype by Hugo Stangenwald. Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library. This young Hawaiian woman is wearing a missionary-designed holokū dress, shawl, black lace mantilla, velvet choker, earrings, brooch, and other jewelry. She has fresh flowers in her hair and around her neck.

  Figure 9.3

  Nigerian pelete bite (cut-thread cloth). Buguma, Nigeria. Photograph by Joanne B. Eicher. Amonia Akoko, a Kalabari woman, is holding a length of pelete bite. She is also wearing a wrapper of pelete bite of her own design.

  Figure 9.4

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

  Figure 9.5

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

  Figure 9.6

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

  Figure 9.7

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

  Figure 9.8

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

  Figure 9.9

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

  Acknowledgements

  This book is the result of a series of conversations at conferences and symposia. We acknowledge all those who listened to our ideas and encouraged us in our efforts to expand fashion history beyond the West. We are especially indebted to Joanne Eicher, our “dress mother,” for advice and encouragement throughout the entire project.

  The ideas in this book were first presented at the Costume Society of America in 2011, and subsequently published (at the invitation of editor Sally Helvenston) as a Forum in Dress, the Society’s scholarly journal (Lillethun, Welters, and Eicher 2012). The discussion continued at the annual conferences of the International Textile and Apparel Association in 2011, 2012, and 2013. Our thanks go to colleagues who participated in the panel discussions: Linda Arthur Bradley (Washington State University), Seunghye Cho (Framingham State University), Joanne Eicher (University of Minnesota), Dilia Lopez-Gydosh (University of Delaware), and the late Charlotte Jirousek (Cornell University).

  Further paper presentations and informal talks took place at the second biannual “Non-Western Fashion Conference” in London, England, in 2013 and the “Dressing Global Bodies” Conference in Edmonton, Canada, in 2016. Presenters and participants at the Textile Museum’s 2015 Symposium in Washington D.C., “Picturing China: Qing-Dynasty Photography and Fashion,” also unraveled new threads. These academic gatherings succeeded in doing what conferences and symposia are intended to do: share research and information and alert attendees to what other scholars are thinking. Thanks to all presenters and attendees for their insights.

  The editorial staff at Bloomsbury has been extraordinarily helpful and patient. We thank Kathryn Earle and Anna Wright, who initially shepherded the idea for a book through to a proposal. Once the proposal was accepted, Hannah Crump, Frances Arnold, and Pari Thomson took over the reins. We appreciate their guidance and good humor.

  Many institutions provided gratis images to illustrate our ideas. These include Special Collections at the University of Rhode Island Library, the Historic Textile and Costume Collection at the University of Rhode Island, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Yale University’s Bienecke Library and The Lewis Walpole Library, the Laskaridis Foundation in Athens, National Gallery (UK), the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Wellcome Library (London), and the Artifact Museum in Haenam City (Korea). For assistance at these and other repositories, we extend our thanks. Individuals who facilitated image acquisition include Tina Bates, Joanne Eicher, Axel Langer, Kyung-Eun Lee, Yoonsup Chung, Hyungsik Yun, Sengkheang Penh, and anonymous donors.

  We are extremely grateful to the University of Rhode Island Center for the Humanities for awarding a subvention grant to partially fund acquisition of rights and permissions for photographs.

  Individuals who aided us in other ways include our respective university’s interlibrary loan specialists (Emily Green at URI and Kevin Prendergast at Montclair State University), Susan Jerome of URI’s Historic Textile and Costume Collection, Fafar Bayat for illustrative material, and James Middleton for consultation. For other assistance, great and small, we thank Mae Chae, Kristen Chaney, Allison Ellston, Ji-Hye Kang, Anna Rose Keefe, Rebecca Kelly, Sheng Lu, Lauren Mione, Lindsay Michael, Joseph Shemtov, and Cara Tremain.

  Finally, the authors thank friends and family for tolerating reduced levels of socialization while this book was being written.

  Foreword

  Joanne B. Eicher

  What an exciting book to read on fashion history! Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun’s volume is based on the premise that all human beings are open to change, a basic idea of fashion. Not only are Homo sapiens open to change, we are creative. The usual histories, however, of what we call costume, dress, or fashion, ethnocentrically declare that fashion is a Western phenomenon not acknowledging the possibility of fashion in non-Western cultures. Welters and Lillethun refreshingly smash this ethnocentrism, call it a fallacy, and provide documentation of fashion changes across the globe, historically and contemporaneously. Chapter 1 is a landmark presentation that outlines the case for why a comprehensive history of fashion must be global, buttressed by a broad array of scholarly views. Arguments first developed by Eric Wolf, the anthropologist who wrote Europe and the People Without History in 1982, feature prominently.

  Chapters 2, 3, and 4, in Part 1, follow with review of the lexicon used in writing about how we dress our bodies and assessment of key fashion theories and fashion historiography. I consider Part 2 their tour de force, however, which rests on case studies of fashions beyond the West, examples from India and China, cultures existing centuries before the rise of the West. In addition, it reports fashion change in precolonial and colonial societies in the Americas, Africa, and Southeast Asia. These case studies include examples from their own research on New England natives and in Greece, Latvia, Indonesia, and the Bronze Age. From these, they move on to fashion in indigenous cultures, using Jennifer Craik’s (2009) notion of the “fashion impulse” that reinforces the idea of creativity existing in Homo sapiens from prehistory to the present. They report on archaeological findings and early trade networks regarding resources for jewelry, silk textiles, and tailored garments. Grave finds and rock art are some of the early forms of archaeological evidence of dress and fashion change along with tools used. Embellishment of the body with beads and tattoos certainly demonstrates the creative urge of human beings through time.

  To intrigue readers more, a few of my favorites follow. Although Native Americans’ wearing of untailored furs, skins, and pelts did not appeal to Europeans who interacted with them, the Native Americans demonstrated change in moccasins, leggings, various body coverings acting as garments, and hairstyling. A first-century CE example came from a ship captain based in Egypt who wrote about purple cloths and “clothing in the Arabian style with sleeves; plain, ordinary, embroidered, or interwoven with gold.” Welters and Lillethun found extensive Chinese examples: a colorful one comes from Chinese fashions of imperial court ornaments of imported kingfisher feathers of iridescent blues from lapis to turquoise used over the years from BCE into CE. Byzantine hairstyles and various garments are another case of changing styles over time, sometimes the choice of a style distinguishing them from the dominant Romans. Braudel and Lipovetsky, often cited about fashion, claim that the Chinese seldom altered what they wore. This included, for Braudel, not only China but also Japan, India, Turkey, and Algeria. Welters and Lillethun successfully contradict that claim arguing that Braudel and Lipovetsky often fell into the trap of being blinded by seeing only tailored clothing as possibly having fashion, not understanding that simply cut or wrapped and draped garments also change over time. Shapes, however, can change in ways of draping and wrapping. Also types of textiles, colors, patterns, motifs, and trims change, which indicates fashion.

  I particularly enjoy the example of Chinese makeup of dark lips, painted eyebrows, and no facial powder described by a poet of the ninth century that contrasts with reports of white powdered faces in sixteenth-century China. Readers will treasure these and other examples, too, when they are read and savored beyond my small number of selections reported here. The extensive documentation from China, reinforced with Korean, Japanese, Indian, and Javanese examples in Chapter 7 illustrates that in this range of Asian settings, fashion has been a vibrant part of life. Moving from Eastern examples, in Chapter 8 Welters and Lillethun turn to unexpected Western illustrations citing earlier dates than the fourteenth century, often used to pinpoint fashion’s birth by fashion historians. They mention Sara-Grace Heller using French romance literature as documentation prior to the fourteenth century for fashion change. Welters and Lillethun also quote Greek and Roman sources with BCE dates, pointing out the challenges related to archaeological finds.

 
Chapter 9 investigates what they call “global fashion,” reviewing the impact of the West on the rest of the world, but also the rest of the world on the West. They begin with citing several authors who point to the impact of the West in colonization. They also discuss native-made bark cloth change in Hawai‘i and the dress called holokū, although a result of Western introduction becomes a fashion that had Hawaiian stylistic input. African examples include comments by a merchant from the Dutch West India Company in 1705. He observed that the African females were committed to elaborate dressing to allure Westerners. Another compelling example of fashion comes from the research of Karen Tranberg Hansen, who documented clearly that fashion arose when Zambians purchased secondhand clothing shipped from Western countries, then choosing to refashion their purchases to suit their own tastes.

  In Chapter 10, Welters and Lillethun conclude: “The increase in published research relevant to the globalization of fashion history is heartening.” They have done yeoman service by bringing together many examples of such research to date from across the globe, paving the way for a much bigger enterprise than their first step toward accomplishing that goal. Such an enterprise would be writing a chronological account of global fashion from prehistory to present, a gigantic task. These two authors, however, have made a strong, compelling argument and provided an excellent foundation for such an accomplishment.

  1

  INTRODUCTION: EUROPE AND THE PEOPLE WITHOUT FASHION