Fashion History
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As trade with Europe and beyond commenced, silk was introduced to Central America (Duan 2016). Spaniards imported black mulberry trees and silkworm eggs into Mexico in 1536 in an attempt to develop a silk industry. Common people wore this novel (to them) fiber despite attempts by the Mexican government to control who wore silk. Domestic sericulture faded away after the Manila galleon trade brought Chinese silks to Mesoamerica in 1573. Subsequently, Spanish Americans developed a partiality for silks despite the warm climate for which the indigenous cotton would have been more practical. Although people of Spanish extraction wished to distinguish themselves through their dress, mixed-race groups were quick to take up “new goods, styles, and practices” (DuPlessis 2016: 224).
Fashion systems in South America
The New World’s other great ancient civilization w as the Andean civilization. The area south of Mesoamerica that now includes contemporary Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, northern Argentina, and northern Chile has been occupied since at least 9000 BCE, with increasingly complex societies after 1000 CE (Meisch 2010). The last pre-Hispanic culture that ruled this large area was the Inca, who gained control in the 1460s. Andean geography varies from dry coastal areas adjacent to the Pacific Ocean to the high plains and peaks of the Andes mountain range. The north coast of Peru receives some rainfall, but the larger central and south coastal areas are very dry. Given that Peruvians buried their dead in layers of clothing, this desert-like climate allowed for excellent preservation of cloth and clothing. Likewise, sacrificial burials found in the frozen highlands include textiles. Some areas such as Ecuador are wetter, and less is known about their pre-Inca dress. However, textile and dress historians have a plethora of information about stylistic change in pre-Conquest Andean cultures on which to base their investigations (Anawalt 2007).
Cotton is native to the lowlands while the highlands are home to wool-bearing camelids: the alpaca and vicuña, which grow fine fibers, and the llama, which grows coarser fibers. Andean cultures were also in proximity to the Amazon River basin with its colorful birds that supplied feathers for garments and headgear. Archaeological finds provide evidence that Peruvian cultures enjoyed a robust trade network between the coastal regions, the highlands, and the tropical regions of the continent.
Ancient Andean cultures were highly advanced in weaving and other textile constructions. They used several types of looms, including backstrap looms, to create woven clothing. Like the Mesoamericans, they planned their weaving so that the fabric that came off the loom had an intended purpose and was used without cutting. Some sewing of panels of cloth was employed to make large mantles and garments. Men wore loincloths, uncu (tunics), mantles, and various types of headgear. Inca women wore a one-piece dress consisting of a rectangle that wrapped around the body called an aksu (also acsu, aqsu, acso, anaku, and other variants). It was either pinned at the shoulder with a long stickpin, a tupu, and belted, or partially sewn (Meisch 2010; Rowe 1995–1996). In Ecuador, women had worn a wrapped skirt and mantle prior to the Inca period, but adopted the full-length wrapped dress under the Inca regime (Rowe and Meisch 2011).
Like Mesoamerica, the basic garment shapes did not change significantly, but the materials and motifs did. Scholars can categorize and roughly date textile types by designs and techniques. A very wide range of textile techniques has been identified including twining, plaiting, knotting, looping, sprang, plain and twill weave, tapestry, double-sided tapestry, gauze weave, embroidery, and ikat dyeing (Meisch 2010). (Ikat fabrics are created by resist dyeing yarns prior to weaving, resulting in patterned areas with hazy edges.) Andean cultures produced tapestries with very high thread counts; for example, the Huari culture (ca. 400–700 CE) created finer tapestry cloths than Europeans did centuries later, weaving over 200 weft threads per inch (Rowe 2005). The concept of fashion is applicable in terms of broad changes over time that occurred in basic garment styles as well as patterns woven or embroidered into the cloths, or in the fabric structures.
Ann Pollard Rowe, who has researched textiles and dress in South America for decades, wrote in the preface to Costume and History in Highland Ecuador that she realized a historical context was necessary “to make even the simplest statements” in discussing the dress of Ecuador’s indigenous peoples (Rowe and Meisch 2011: xi). Change came to pre-Hispanic dress practices with the Inca conquest, and then again when the Spanish arrived.
Peru’s Chimu culture (ca. 800–1532 CE) created matched sets of clothes with loincloth, tunic, and headdress in coordinated styles that are datable to specific periods (Rowe 1984). Like pre-Columbians before them, they worked with feathers, tying colorful quills onto base cloth to create tunics and impressive headgear. Figure 5.6 illustrates a feather tunic from the Chimu culture of Peru. The feathers in the background are yellow while the feathers of the bird motifs are turquoise; the other small figural elements use feathers of red or green.
Figure 5.6 Feather tunic, Peru. Chimu culture. Plain weave with paired warps (cotton), with applied feathers. The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C., 91.395. Acquired by George Hewett Myers in 1941. Pre-Hispanic Peruvians produced highly sophisticated textiles and featherwork, often in matched sets, which are datable to specific cultures.
In 1528, the Spanish arrived on the Pacific beaches of the Peruvian north coast. Four years later in 1532, Conquistador Francisco Pizarro led the expedition that conquered the Inca Empire, which extended from Ecuador in the north to Chile in the far south. The Spaniards laid claim to the empire’s riches of gold and silver, decimating the culture, just as they had done to the Maya in Mexico. Following the execution of Inca Emperor Atahualpa, Pizarro married Atahualpa’s consort, a child bride. She received a Spanish name and bore Pizarro two mestizo sons. The marriage of Nusta (indigenous noblewoman) Beatriz Clara Coya, the niece of the deceased Incan emperor, to Martin Garcia de Loyola also merged the Inca royalty with the Spanish conquerors. Beatriz’s European-style wedding attire is depicted in a painting as having bands of Inca geometric iconography called tukapu (also tocapu) (Leibsohn and Mundy 2005). Tukapu signaled social status and role (Meisch 2010). Just as in the viceroyalty of New Spain that reached from Panama to California, in the viceroyalty of Peru, which covered most of South America, marriage between ethnicities led to hierarchical classifications of the children of the couples. The practice of delineating the various couplings and assigning their children a type—as depicted in the casta paintings, which originated in Mexico—apparently held less sway in Peru. Only one extant casta painting from Peru survives (Bagneris 2013: 167).
Throughout the viceroyalty, Inca elite women continued to wear the aksu and the anaku; both terms referred to a wrapped dress (Rowe and Meisch 2011). Their dress marked by tukapu bands announced their high status to other natives as well as to the Spanish. While an aksu or anaku worn by an elite woman continued to include a tukapu band, another motif band might display indigenous feminine iconography such as birds and flowers (Bagneris 2013: 190–93). The tukapu reflecting the continuity of the Inca culture contrasted with the motifs in the metal tupu (stickpin): an elite woman’s tupu, whi ch might be fifteen inches long and include a terminus, or head, of three to six inches in width, reflected style change. Emblems in the terminus of extant silver tupu incorporate both European metal-smithing techniques and iconography (Bagneris 2013: 191–93). Inca men’s attire also reflected the influence of European material culture. A man’s seventeenth-century unku (Brooklyn Museum #86.224.51) includes embroidery that apparently occurred in three stages. The tukapu band around the bottom edge, embroidered in wool, is considered original. On one side of the tunic above the tukapu band were added stylized human figures that portray Inca royal events, but on the other side of the tunic, the band added above the tukapu presents non-Inca imagery, techniques, and materials. Worked in linen and metallic thread, this band includes European-style heraldic lions and shields. The incorporation of European iconography, techniques, and materials into elite Incan material culture may be viewed as
a choice that purposefully targeted making their “status legible to the Spanish,” a goal that could ensure status privileges (Bagneris 2013: 193). Yet, such changes also comply with our understanding of fashion in which a group adopts a style, in this case European-style motifs simultaneously worn with Inca motifs. A strategy for communication through dress and accessories is compatible with fashion.
Travelers to Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remarked upon the dress they observed there, emphatically commenting on the luxurious textiles (Earle 2001: 182, 188). The high quality of the clothing and currency of the fashions of lower classes incited comments of disbelief (Earle 2001: 182, 188). Peru was a leading trade center. Chinese traders delivered fine patterned silks, and from Europe arrived the favored Flemish laces and fine linen. In the urban Pacific ports such as Trujillo and Lima (the seat of the viceroyalty), and far away in the cities of today’s Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile, consumers ignored restrictions on “stuffs” to indulge their preferences to the extent that they could afford (Earle 2001), and the underground market in fine textiles and trimmings thrived. Watercolors painted in Peru in the late eighteenth century in the folio volumes of Bishop Baltazar Jaime Martínez Compañon’s Trujillo del Peru (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional) illustrate numerous examples of women who displayed a variety of fashions and tastes in trimmings and accessories. These included a cummerbund, an apron of fine linen and lace, and colorful stockings and garters. Flat slip-on shoe styles prevailed, often in open-toed styles (Guengerich 2013).
The painting A Merry Company on the Banks of the Rívas River (ca. 1790–1800, Figure 5.7) portrays the distinctive pollera ensemble as worn by Peruvian Spanish elite women and their black and mulatto servants in the late eighteenth century. The image presents a family and friends outdoors accompanied by servants. A black harp player in the center of the group provides music. The wealth of the Spanish family, signified by the distant estate house on the left, extends to the dress of the Spanish men and women, and to the servants. However, on the left, in plain clothes and sandals, an indigenous woman enters the scene, perhaps to sell flowers. The men in the party of revelers are dressed in current late eighteenth-century European fashions, and the black male servant reflects the same European style.
Figure 5.7 “A Merry Company on the Banks of the Rímac River,” ca. 1800. Lima School. Oil on canvas, 26 x 35 ½ in. (66 x 90.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Lilla Brown in memory of her husband, John W. Brown, by exchange, 2012.41. The women, servants and elites alike, wear the distinctive pollera ensemble of late-eighteenth to early- nineteenth century Andean culture. The fashion diverged from the dominant European silhouette of the time, instead presenting a regional hybrid style.
The pollera ensemble that developed and became fashionable in viceregal Peru, and thus was worn from current Ecuador to Argentina, diverged from the dominant eighteenth-century European women’s fashion. The skirt, with its several trims and petticoats, ended well above the ankle instead of at the ankle or shoe top. The skirt was dome shaped rather than elliptical. The upper body was not corseted and no gown or bodice covered the voluminous camisa (chemise) embellished with lace and embroidery. At the Costume Society of America annual symposium in 2014, James Middleton proposed an alternative to the widely accepted concept that the look developed solely from historical Spanish fashion. In Spain, a women’s at-home dress consisted in part of a wrapped skirt called faldellin, a camisa, and a jacket with open sleeves called jubón. According to Middleton (2014), this Spanish at-home attire and the wrapped skirts and dresses of elite Inca women each contributed to the distinctive pollera ensemble style. The wrapped Inca dress (aksu, anaku), which the Spanish initially would have perceived as falling short of proper public dress, was eventually understood as appropriate dress as worn by Inca women. In this context, the intersection of the two wrapped dress forms provided the opening for creole (European born in the colonies) Spanish women to wear their own culture’s relaxed style in public, according to Middleton. A pollera ensemble with a wrapped skirt seldom appears in the eighteenth-century visual record. Regularly shaped folds, such as those made by cartridge pleats, a centuries-old European pleat technique, seen in the skirts in Figure 5.7 and in the Trujillo del Peru watercolors, are more common in surviving images. Thus, we conclude that the pollera, as described by Middleton, is a hybridized style.
In the cities and remote villages of the Andean region today, Aymara and Quechua women wear localized pollera ensemble fashions. As with the eighteenth-century style, the modern Andean styles reflect hybridity resulting from a confluence of influences and cultural selections. The Andean fashions continue to reflect colonial heritage, ethnic traditions, and new impulses from the modern global context. In La Paz, Bolivia, a bowler-style felt hat, long associated with the pollera style, is commonly worn; elsewhere other styles that shield the eyes from the sun are worn. Blouses with lace or embroidery, reminiscent of the lace-embellished linen camisas seen in Figure 5.7, are worn; in cold regions, layers of sweaters are seen. In some locations, a snuggly fitted wool jacket covers the blouse. A wrap or shawl woven of local alpaca fibers often drapes the shoulders. Shawls may have fringed ends or include macramé-fringed edges on all sides. A carrying cloth woven with native symbols continues the ancient heritage. The dome-shaped skirt, created by multiple petticoat layers topped by a woven skirt, has many variants. Skirt styling ranges from wrapped to gathered to pleated, including the previously mentioned cartridge pleats. Flat slip-on shoes, low-heeled lace-up boots, or sandals protect the fee t. Colors, textiles, embroidery, jewelry, and shoes provide opportunity for style options. Elayne Zorn, for example, documented an autonomous fashion system in highland Bolivia “where tens of thousands of members of an indigenous ethnic group are passionately concerned about fashion, but with the difference that they design and produce almost all of their clothing themselves” (Zorn 2005: 115). Loren’s (2012) interpretation of historical dress processes in the Americas, the selection and adaptation of fashion, applies to the modern context; the contemporary Andean pollera ensemble is both an identity construction and a statement of fashion as the style preference of a group even as the fashion may be specific to a small locale.
Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean offer rich opportunities for research connecting dress to fashion systems among indigenous peoples. This applies to the pre-Conquest period, the era of colonization by Spain and Portugal, and the current age of independence. Scholars have tended to see the dress of this large geographical area as either traditional, hybrid, or Western, with fashion applying only to the latter. It is time to follow Diana DiPaolo Loren’s lead in North America and consider how indigenous groups in Meso- and South America fashioned their own identities by selectively adapting Euro-American styles while retaining parts of their heritage. As Regina Root has stated, “Latin American fashion design and history has long been overlooked” (2013: 393). She concluded that “scholars will need to assess carefully and push forward definitive Latin American fashion histories in the future” (2013: 403).
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FASHION SYSTEMS AND TRADE NETWORKS IN THE EASTERN HEMISPHERE
The market-town of Muza is without a harbor, but has a good roadstead and anchorage because of the sandy bottom thereabouts, where the anchors hold safely. The merchandise imported there consists of purple cloths, both fine and coarse; clothing in the Arabian style, with sleeves; plain, ordinary, embroidered, or interwoven with gold; saffron, sweet rush, muslins, cloaks, blankets (not many), some plain and others made in the local fashion; sashes of different colors.
THE PERIPLUS OF THE ERYTHRAEAN
SEA: CHAPTER 24
An unnamed Greek-speaking ship captain based in Alexandria (Egypt) wrote these words in the first century CE. The Periplus documented distances, coastal landmarks, and harbors along the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean as a guide for other seafaring merchants. He reported that fashion goods such as ivory, tortoise shell, and copper for bra
celets and anklets could be obtained in ports along the eastern coast of Africa. In towns on the Arabian Peninsula, like the above-mentioned Muza, goods imported from the Arabian interior could be sourced. The navigable routes across the Indian Ocean reached ports on India’s West Coast, where Indian muslins, figured linens, “thin clothing of the finest weaves,” and “bright-colored girdles a cubit wide” were available (The Periplus: Chapter 49). Around the tip of India and up to the mouth of the Ganges River traders could acquire raw silk, silk yarn, and silk cloth brought over great distances by foot. Notable in the above quote is the emphasis on Arabian style, with sleeves. Artfully draped garments had signified the height of civilization to the Greeks and Romans in the first century, but their introduction to new materials and styles such as sleeved garments from Persia and silk from China was about to usher in a new world of fashion.
This chapter presents examples of fashion that relied upon Eurasian land and sea trade routes forged in ancient times. Trade disseminates materials and processes as well as ideas and concepts. As sites of novelty, new materials and processes play important roles in fashion systems; desire for novelty, the so-called fashion impulse, serves as an impetus to fashion. Bronze Age luxury trade, Silk Road commodities, textiles and dress of selected Eurasian courts, and the Malaysian archipelago’s kebaya serve as examples of the nexus of trade and fashion in selected regions in Eurasia.
Luxury trade in the Ancient Near East
Luxury goods circulated in the Ancient Near East as early as the Bronze Age, supporting our argument that the fashion impulse was at work long before previously acknowledged. The geographical area known as the Ancient Near East includes an east-west span from the eastern Mediterranean into the Iranian Plateau and a north-south span from the Black and Caspian Seas to the Arabian Sea at the southern edge of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula. Ancient cultures of the region include, among others, the Minoan and Mycenaean, Canaan, Assyrian, Hittite, Sumerian, Babylonian, Median, Elam, and the Egyptian Kingdoms. Connections with farther distant regions existed, especially with cultures in the extended geographical ranges in Africa, and central and south Asia.