This pattern of Eurocentrism, the practice of viewing the world from a European perspective with the implication of the superiority of its own culture, was well established by the eighteenth century. The above discussion shows how entrenched Eurocentrism became embedded in the costume history field. The emphasis was soundly on civilized Europe and its real or perceived heritage in ancient Mediterranean and near eastern cultures. Further, the dress of rural peoples in Europe was treated as a separate branch of inquiry, and in this way, fashion was separated from nonurban dress practices.
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries
Books from 1900 to 1960s
By the twentieth century, the perspectives of the various disciplines with an interest in dress influenced histories of dress. Theatrical costumers needed references to design period costumes for the stage and the emerging cinema. Museum professionals in departments of costume and textiles, or those working with ethnographic collections, needed detailed works to help them identify objects. Educators, particularly in the United States in what became known as the home economics field, needed accurate references and textbooks for teaching design.
Max Tilke, a German artist and ethnographer, was among the first to focus on dress as an object. Acknowledging expanding interest from artists and fashion firms, he realized that something was missing from previous publications: the dress itself, meaning the cut, construction, and embellishment. To remedy the problem, he gathered patterns on garments he encountered on his journeys through North Africa, Spain, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. He also visited museum collections. The result was Orientalische Kostüme in Schnitt und Farbe (Oriental Costumes in Cut and Color (1923)). His publication coincided with the height of international interest in the “Orient,” a vague designation that covered North Africa and most of Asia.
Tilke made careful renderings of garments from the places he visited, plus China and Japan. The garment in Figure 4.5, drawn from the original in the Museum für Volkerkunde (Ethnological Museum) in Berlin, is a tobe from a colonial region called at that time “French Soudan.” It features narrow cotton fabrics woven on strip looms sewn together and embroidered in silk. His illustrations of flattened garments off the body, showing seams and ornamentation placement, were a novel approach. Tilke’s book met with great approval, and he went on to publish multiple costume titles in several languages.
Figure 4.5 A tobe from colonial French Soudan. Plate 13, Max Tilke. Orientalische Kostüme in Schnitt und Farbe. Berlin: Verlag Ernst Wesmuth A-G, 1923. Special Collections, University of Rhode Island Library. Tilke’s illustrations showed garments off the body, flattened to show seams and decoration. He emphasized garments from non-Western cultures like this tobe from the colonial region called French Soudan.
Although many nineteenth-century dress history books were bound with chromolithographs, the advent of photography in 1839 made media other than “faithful drawings” possible. However, fashion publications did not use photography to display fashion until the 1910s. Even then, fashion photography vied with fashion illustration for decades at fashion magazines and in fashion history books. Thus, it is not surprising that it took until the twentieth century for photography to be fully exploited in fashion history publications, especially color photography.
The English and French have been leaders in chronicling the history of Western fashion, joined by Germans and Americans. Notable authors include the prolific Cecil Willet Cunnington and Phillis Cunnington, who wrote many books based on their personal collection of English women’s fashion now housed in Manchester, England, at the Gallery of Costume, Platt Hall. Together and individually, they wrote over two dozen books about fashion history, most of which were originally published in the 1950s and 1960s. The Cunningtons focused on everyday dress and undergarments. They illustrated their books with drawings and occasional photographs. James Laver, former keeper of prints, drawings, and paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, also penned many books including a general survey entitled The Concise History of Costume and Fashion (1969b). As discussed in Chapter 3, he promoted the “shifting erogenous zones” theory of fashion change (Laver 1969a).
In Germany, Emma von Sichart edited Karl Köhler’s 1871 German costume book, scrapping his historical introductions and modifying the illustrations and patterns. She added photographs of people modeling original garments as well as reproductions and theatrical costumes. It was published in English in 1928 as A History of Costume. Dover released an unabridged edition in 1963 (Köhler 1963). The value in Köhler’s work was that he looked at garments, or their reproductions in art, and drafted patterns, although Sichart modified them. It was a popular textbook for historic costume classes, especially in theater.
In the United States, theatrical costume designer Millia Davenport collected thousands of photographic images for her 1948 The Book of Costume. The book covered Western fashion from ancient Egypt until 1860. She prefaced her work with the comments that books illustrated by the author are “terrible” and that the best books are the ones “with the most pictures” (Davenport 1948: ix). Thus, her work includes a whopping 2,778 black-and-white photographs with extensive captions. It was reprinted in 1964. This book remains a valuable reference.
In France, François Boucher’s 20,000 Years of Fashion appeared in 1965 and was reprinted in 1987. It had 1,188 illustrations, many in color, with no redrawings. Boucher’s book was outstanding in this regard; it is still used as a college textbook. The author used the terms “costume” and “fashion” interchangeably starting with fourteenth-century dress, despite the promising title.
Fashion history publications from 1900 through the 1960s had several elements in common. First, their coverage was decidedly Western. Many books followed the pattern established in previous centuries by examining the ancient world to the modern in Europe and its diaspora, reflecting the model in art history scholarship. Second, they were primarily descriptive. Interpretive examinations would come later. Third, many of them were based on sound academic research, which explains the many reprints of these classic texts.
Most of the titles use the word “costume” rather than “fashion.” Costume was seen as the all-embracing term that included ancient and medieval dress as well as fashion. Costume did not have the dress-up connotation that it has today. Yet, although the word “costume” was broad enough to cover the ancient and medieval eras, the dress of non-Western cultures was largely ignored as it was outside the parameters of interest. Only Tilke and Planché looked beyond the usual geographical boundaries.
Costume history textbooks
Costume history has been taught in American colleges and universities since the early twentieth century. The courses were part of the home economics curriculum, which had begun a half-century earlier when social reformers applied scientific principles to homemaking. The movement received a boost in 1862 when the US Congress passed the Morrill Act, which established land-grant universities in every state. Home economics was considered a field appropriate for women.
At the 1910 American Home Economics Association meeting, Jane Fales advocated for a course in historic costume so that students (mostly female) would understand artistic design and develop originality (Fales 1911). Such a course was meant to serve as an inspiration for designers and dressmakers. As it was, dressmaking ranked third in employment for women in the United States in 1916 (Allinson 1916). Thus, a costume history course was justified. The proposed syllabus surveyed the dress of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, ancient Gaul, the Franks, and modern France from the Merovingians to the French Republic. Interestingly, America was not included; Fales stated, “In America, we have no past” (Fales 1911: 244). Home economics units evolved, and separated into textiles and clothing departments, which were renamed to include design and fashion merchandising; through all these organizational changes, costume history courses remained part of the core curriculum. Although some professors in American universities called for a less Eurocentric viewpoint in costume histo
ry classes, little has changed (Jasper and Roach-Higgins 1987).
In the beginning, there was no textbook. Faculty members assigned background reading from general histories and collected fashion plates for illustrative purposes. Eventually the previously discussed books by Köhler, Davenport, Boucher, and Laver served as textbooks.
Blanche Payne, a professor at the University of Washington, wrote one of the first comprehensive histories of Western dress intended as a textbook. Published in 1965, it treated men’s and women’s dress equally, stopping at 1900. Payne traveled to museums in the United States and Europe, where she made pattern drafts from extant garments and sourced original artwork to accompany her text. She also researched folk dress in the former Yugoslavia in the 1930s; she produced a manuscript on Yugoslavian dress, but did not secure a publisher. Payne’s History of Costume was the most widely used textbook for decades. Twenty years after her death it was revised and updated (Payne, Winakor, and Farrell-Beck 1992). A challenger with a similar temporal and geographical scope appeared in 1989 in Phyllis Tortora and Keith Eubank’s Survey of Historic Costume. It became the dominant textbook. It is now in its sixth edition with a new author, Sara Marcketti, replacing Eubank (2015).
Theater costume classes for many years used Lucy Barton’s Historic Costume for the Stage, published in 1935. Focusing on styles frequently used in theatrical productions, it was accompanied by pattern drafts for specific garments. Douglas Russell’s Stage Costume Design: Theory, Technique, and Style replaced it upon its publication in 1973.
All of the textbooks trace the history of dress as it reflects Western civilizations, with varied attention to ancient cultures of the Near East and Mediterranean. Tortora and Marcketti (2015) have responded to the need for a global perspective by including boxed features called “global connections.” Cross-cultural influences on Western dress are incorporated into coursework. Although some universities offer courses in ethnic dress, global fashion history courses are rare.
Daniel Hill took on the monumental task of writing about the history of world dress (2011). He attempted to be comprehensive, and he avoided privileging the West. At about the same time, Oxford University Press and Berg Publishers released the ten-volume Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (2010). These are important resources. Yet, there is no uniform agreement on how to build a global framework into existing courses. What remains to be written is a world fashion history textbook appropriate for undergraduate courses.
In Europe, by the 1960s, the history of dress was a subject taught in theater design and in art and design schools offering fashion diplomas. Not until the latter twentieth century and the acceptance of cultural history as a scholarly endeavor did fashion history courses and degree programs appear at European universities.
Journals/periodicals
The formation of societies devoted to the study of historic dress resulted in meetings and symposia for the purpose of presenting research. The Costume Society of Great Britain was formed in 1964 and published their first journal Costume in 1967. Costume publishes articles from a broad chronological period and with a worldwide remit, emphasizing the social significance of dress.
The Costume Society of America formed in 1973 and began publishing its journal Dress in 1975. It publishes peer-reviewed scholarship on dress in art, social history, anthropology, and material culture. It also invites work on fundamental concerns such as theory and research methods
The journal titled Fashion Theory appeared in 1997 aimed at a more critical analysis than what typically appeared in either Costume or Dress. As stated inside the cover, Fashion Theory “takes as its starting point a definition of ‘fashion’ as the cultural construction of the embodied identity.” It publishes works on both historic and contemporary dress.
More recently, Intellect Publishers has entered the arena with a host of titles focusing on fashion. These include Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, which is dedicated to fashion scholarship and its interfacings with popular culture. Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion focuses on the many dimensions of men’s appearance. Clothing Cultures takes a semiotic approach to dress studies, making a distinction between “clothing” and “fashion.” While clothing covers the body, “fashion alludes to the glamorous, the ephemeral and the avante garde.” The International Journal of Fashion Studies aims to bring the fashion scholarship of non-English-speaking authors to English-speaking audiences by providing translation services after peer review. While all of Intellect’s journals emphasize current fashion discourse, historic topics are included.
A variety of other journals ranging from Winterthur Portfolio to Textile: Cloth and Culture publish research on the history of dress. As will be discussed later in this chapter, interest in fashion history has expanded into many disciplines, enriching the many perspectives to be considered. Journals from the disciplines of history, anthropology, geography, and more have published peer-reviewed scholarship on dress history topics.
Museum exhibitions/catalogs
Curators in museums work with objects to illustrate themes about art, culture, and history. Museums mounted increasing numbers of costume exhibitions starting in the 1970s, when the history discipline embraced its social and cultural dimensions. Art and design museums soo n followed. More recently, museum curators in non-fashion departments have been including dress and textiles in thematic exhibitions.
Many museums in North America have departments of costume/fashion. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute began mounting annual exhibitions in 1972. These exhibitions, always accompanied by a catalog, have grown into major fundraisers for the museum. The openings (e.g., the Met Ball) have become fashion spectacles of their own, with much-photographed celebrities in designer fashions. The exhibitions have raised the profile of fashion history immeasurably. The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York’s garment district, regularly features exhibitions and catalogs. The Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and the McCord Museum in Montreal have all contributed to fashion history scholarship in North America.
In London, it is the Victoria and Albert Museum that regularly mounts fashion exhibitions. In Paris, it is the Musée de la Mode. In Japan, it is the Kyoto Costume Institute. This list could go on, but suffice it to say that many historical museums and art museums across the world have produced exhibitions and catalogs with long-lasting relevance.
The early focus of costume exhibitions was on stylistic analysis of elite fashions. Simple chronologies are no longer enough. Instead, curators employ postmodern frameworks to explore themes across time and space (Crawley and Barbieri 2013).
Encyclopedias and other reference works
The new millennium saw an uptick in the publishing of encyclopedias for reference works in many fields. Fashion did not escape this development. One of the first was Valerie Steele’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion (2005), which has 640 essays focusing on the emerging field of fashion studies. It was advertised as featuring “multidisciplinary critical insights into history and contemporary experience of clothing and fashion.” A plethora of encyclopedias on dress and fashion have appeared since 2005 (Condra 2013, Snodgrass 2014, Lynch and Strauss 2015).
Most ambitious was the ten-volume Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, edited by Joanne Eicher. It is especially important for a history of world fashion because the coverage is comprehensive. There is more depth in the topics from 1700 forward. Arranged geographically, it does not favor the West. It is billed as the first single reference work to explore all aspects of dress and fashion globally, from prehistory to the present day.
The future of printed encyclopedias is in question as the knowledge base moves to digital platforms. Leaders in the field of reference works, like the Oxford English Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica, no longer publish printed editions. The Encycl
opedia of World Dress and Fashion is available online as part of the Berg Fashion Library, which also includes over seventy electronic books and exclusive online articles (Eicher 2010).
The digital age has created a new window of opportunity for fashion research. Nearly all academic journals are available digitally; some do not have print versions anymore. Academic services like Digital Commons make self-published scholarship accessible to anyone with internet access the world over.
Another valuable digital resource is the information on museum websites. Museums and universities with fashion departments are posting images and catalog information online. Students and scholars can do object research without leaving home. Some sites have essays accompanying selected objects. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History includes essays on specific objects. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s website features detailed descriptions for specific fashion objects.
The new fashion history
In the 1980s, the “new” fashion history emerged. Valerie Steele was among the first to use this term in the preface to the Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion (2004). The new fashion history embraced the developments taking place in related disciplines; hence, the phrases interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary took on new relevance. While appreciating the groundwork laid by object-based fashion historians, the new fashion history strove for interpretation and cultural context. Significantly, the new fashion history embraced those who had been left out of the old costume history.
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