Fashion History
Page 17
The sultans’ kaftans illustrate shifting tastes in textiles. In addition to Ottoman fabrics, kaftans were made of velvets from Venice and Genoa as well as silks from Persia and China. Style influence moved in both directions: Venetians wore garments made from Turkish velvets as evidenced in Renaissance portraits (Denny and Krody 2012).
Ottoman style continued to evolve in subsequent centuries. Suraiya Faroqhi (2004) argued that the principle of fashion change was present in Ottoman dress as did Charlotte Jirousek (2004). During the eighteenth century, distinctions blurred between servants and their masters and mistresses because of the greater availability and variety of cloth and the lively secondhand clothes market. By the nineteenth century, French and English merchants reported color preferences and “that traders had to be on the alert in order to make timely responses to changes in demand” (Faroqhi 2004: 30).
Westerners found Turkish dress fascinating. Nicolas de Nicolay traveled there in the sixteenth century and included illustrations of Turkish men and women in his costume book Navigations (Figure 4.1). Subsequent authors used his imag es to illustrate their own costume books. In the eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), the wife of the British ambassador to Turkey, wrote letters home describing her experiences at the Ottoman court. While in Istanbul, she wore Turkish dress. When she returned home in 1719, she sat for several portraits wearing Turkish dress. This inspired European and American artists to paint their sitters in Turkish dress, known as turquerie (Peck 2013).
Over the course of the nineteenth century, Turks gradually adopted Western dress. The Ottoman Empire dissolved in 1918 after being defeated in the First World War, and the modern Republic of Turkey emerged in 1923. Its first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, undertook modernization efforts including sumptuary laws banning religious-based clothing such as turbans, hats, and veils. Western hats for men replaced the fez, which was banned in 1925. This short history of Ottoman dress and textiles illustrates how the fashion can be in the fabric.
The Ottomans and the Persians: A shared heritage
The Ottomans shared a common heritage with other peoples who settled in the Middle East, notably in Persia. That heritage originated on the Central Asian steppes with the Seljuqs, one of the nomadic Turkic tribes. They moved west in the eleventh century in search of better pasturelands, eventually reaching Anatolia. As horse riders, their clothing consisted of layers that fitted the body closely, unlike the draped garments of the ancient Mediterranean world or the loose robes of China. Both men and women wore coats over shirts and trousers. The coats fitted closely to the torso and flared at the hip. Some extant examples show coats that fastened on the right in the Tatar style (aqbiya tatariyya) while others buttoned on the left (aqbiya turkiyya) (Canby et al. 2016).
The Seljuqs were a very cultured society of nomads, who lived in tents next to their cities. Their society revolved around hunting, but they believed in pomp and circumstance, feasting, music, and dancing. Clothing and jewelry mattered, and so did having a pleasant aroma. Thus, public baths and attendant rituals had a prominent place in Seljuq settlements. Instruction manuals, such as one titled Mirrors for Princes, advised sultans and their retinue how to dress. Another manual called Book of Elegance and the Elegant devoted substantial attention to attire. It was mainly through gold jewelry and silk garments that a sultan displayed his position. Household slaves dressed to match their master’s status with gold bracelets and anklets.
The few surviving garments reveal motifs on textiles derived from multiple production sites—Spain, Italy, China, and eastern Islamic sources—testifying to the dynamic trade patterns during this time period. The coats are made from elaborately patterned silks with roundel motifs similar to those found elsewhere in the areas where they traded: trees, hunters, birds, harpies, and double-headed eagles. Other artifacts show dress habits too. Bowls depicting musical scenes show women with earrings, diadems, tattooed hands, and patterned robes (Canby et al. 2016).
Originally believers of animism, the Seljuqs absorbed Islam before migrating to Persia, present-day Iran and Iraq. Islam had arisen in the seventh century in Saudi Arabia, and with it came the proscription in the Quran for women to cover their hair. Thus, the veil that was already in wide use became affiliated with Muslim women. Men adopted the turban, again already in use in the Middle East, to signify their religious affiliation.
Coats are Central Asia’s gift to the contemporary wardrobe. Judging from archaeological discoveries in the Tarim Basin, the sleeved coat is much earlier than the Seljuqs. A rare coat was recovered in Xinjiang at Pichan that is dated to the fifth to the second century BCE (Mair 2010). The coat, of cream-colored wool, has a center front opening, a stand-up collar and narrow sleeves. The body silhouette differs from the coats of Yingpin Man and others from the region dated to the second to the eleventh centuries with silhouettes of close-fitting waists. The rare wool coat is straight in the body except for two triangles of cloth inserted under each arm in the side seam. The transformation of the cut of the coat from loose to more fitted as documented in the Xinjiang finds shows that the shape of men’s dress in ancient Central Asia changed over time, while reflecting shifts in taste for textiles from plain cloth to brocade and other pattern weaving (Mair 2010).
Safavid Persian style
Safavid Persian decorative arts have received scholarly attention from textile historians but not from fashion historians. In textbooks, Persia and the cultures that preceded it are mentioned in early chapters as wearers of sleeved coats and trousers during ancient times. While we know now that trousers originated on the Eurasian steppes by 1300 BCE to accommodate horse riding, in the textbooks the first ones presented are on the guards at Persepolis (518–460 BCE). Fast forward to the great Safavid Empire (1501–1722 CE) and we see the same technical capabilities as the Byzantines and Ottomans for textile production. As noted above, Persian textiles were considered more highly developed than Ottoman textiles in the sixteenth century, and they served as a design source for other production centers.
Miniature painting, practised at court workshops in Persia as well as Ottoman Turkey and Mughal India, provides one of the best sources for the study of Safavid dress. Not as much material culture is available as for the Ottoman Empire. The Persian capital moved several times—from Tabriz to Isfahan to Shiraz to Tehran—and as a consequence not much has survived. Manuscript illumination began in the thirteenth century, developing into various schools by the fifteenth century, with the objective of illustrating literature (Scarce 1987).
These miniatures show men and women dressed in garments made of lavish textiles. Men wore a knee-length belted tunic over loose leggings or trousers tucked into calf-length boots. This ensemble was worn over a wide area ranging from Syria to Central Asia and northern India. Indoors, women wore a long belted robe over trousers. The robe had long tight sleeves embellished with contrasting borders. They wore their hair in long thick braids with wisps pulled forward to frame the face. Ornaments often embellished the hair; filmy veils appear, ready to disguise if needed. Makeup accentuated arched eyebrows, and black beauty spots embellished the face and neck (Scarce 1987). Small heart-shaped red lips were admired, as evidenced in Persian poetry. When outdoors, women wore a white body-encompassing veil called a chadar with a separate face veil of horsehair (picheh).
Enjoyment of miniature paintings picked up in the sixteenth century, and they reveal changes in women’s fashion. Necklines changed to a V-shape. Robes became longer and showed numerous variations. The upper-class woman pictured in Figure 6.4 wears a fine gauzy yellow underdress with tight-fitting sleeves. It shows at the neck and arms as well as through the slits in the skirt of her overdress. The overdress is light purple brocaded with figures of hunters chasing rabbits amid vegetation. It is tightly fitted at the waist and belted with a cord. The skirt slits are fastened with brooches. The overdress sports an unusual square-shaped neck. Many others at this time have a deep V neckline. The closures are rows of fl
at silk braid joined with a button and loop. The overdress sleeves are wide, reaching the elbow, and are held with the same brooches as the skirt. Her hair is gathered in a topknot and bound with a light veil. Some hair is brought forward with side curls. A shawl or veil flutters from her shoulders. Around her neck she wears what looks like four necklaces, possibly three of pearls, which were highly valued in Persia. She wears slippers with pointed toes instead of boots. All of this attention to the details in this outfit signifies a love of fashion.
Figure 6.4 “Young woman giving water to her dog,” late sixteenth century. Safavid Persia, gouache miniature, Shah Abbas School. Free Library of Philadelphia. Scala / Art Resource, NY. The elite Safavid woman wears a gauzy underdress and an overdress of fine brocade depicting hunters pursuing rabbits. The overgown’s unusual square neckline implies fashion innovation. Jeweled brooches hold the skirt of the overgown and sleeves in place.
The Safavid Empire included the Georgian homeland, but the Georgian and Persian ethnicities remained distinct. Today, Georgia borders the Black Sea in the west, the Russian Federation in the north, and Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in the south. It was through Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan that Georgia was contiguous with the Persian Safavid Empire. Guests and travelers came to Isfahan, the centrally located Safavid seat of power, from Europe and Asia. Armenian and Georgian elites lived in Isfahan among Persian high society. The cosmopolitan and refined social environment included art collecting, such as painted manuscripts and miniatures (Figure 6.4), which were examined intimately, and in the late seventeenth century a taste developed for large-scale murals displayed in high-ceilinged galleries within palaces and elite homes. Michael Chagnon (2013) investigated five surviving works and among them is the opulently dressed Georgian woman in Figure 6.5.
Figure 6.5 “Young Woman in Georgian Costume,” second half of the seventeenth century / early eighteenth century. Iran. Oil on canvas. New York City. Private Collection. The nearly life-size image represents the dress of a Georgian woman in Safavid Persia. Her attire incorporates fine Safavid silk brocade textiles into the Georgian fashion of flared coat and trousers.
The Georgian woman presented in the oil-on-canvas painting, a medium that arrived from Europe, wore a robe with a tightly fitted bodice and flared skirt over trousers. A mauve-colored shirt, revealed at the neck, is fastened with a golden button. Applied across the bodice lay three horizontal frogged braid fastenings. Each braid included a center front button closing the bodice. The robe’s sumptuous scarlet textile was emblazoned with floral sprays in tones of dark olive and orange, and silver metallic thread. The design of the sinuously arranged floral sprays reflected Persian influence while the flared shape of the robe’s skirt echoed the silhouette of Central Asian coats. A floral border edged the skirt center front and hem edges, and the sleeve hems. Her trousers of a deep plum-colored cloth ended with cuffs of a floral and geometric striped textile. Wrapped around her hips is a sash woven with floral designs in the border and along the edges. Her hat with a wide upturned black brim had a pointed crown covered by a floral textile. Gold earrings dangled from her ear lobes. Leather high-heeled mule-style shoes covered her feet. Her ensemble broadcast a hybrid fashion specific to Persia’s Georgian community.
The nearly life-sized paintings portrayed human types rather than individual people and Figure 6.5 was not a portrait but a symbol of Georgian ethnicity. The murals depicted the “social communities who inhabited Isfahan” yet may have been based upon artistic models from etchings (Chagnon 2013: 258). They represented one “dialect” of “a broader visual language developed for the description of cross-cultural encounters throughout the Early Modern world” (Chagnon 2013: 263). The visual language of depicting human diversity was rooted “in an Enlightenment-era (pseudo-)scientific curiosity about racial development and difference” (Chagnon 2013: 263). The Spanish culture’s casta paintings and Europe’s sixteenth-century costume books also engender this curiosity and broad visual language. European visitors perceived the murals as depictions of the costume of diverse cultures, while members of the Persian empire who admired them as “pleasing” and “wondrous” must also to some degree have understood the murals as signals of the power of the empire (Chagnon 2013: 258).
Like the Ottomans, the Persians influenced Western dress when in 1666 the English king Charles II adopted the Persian vest and coat, which historians regard as the forerunner of the modern three-piece suit. Samuel Pepys recorded the event in his diary, noting its subsequent rapid adoption by the English elite. The Safavid dynasty came to an end in 1796, followed by the Qajar dynasty. It fell in 1925, ushering in the modern Pahlavi era which itself came to an end in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution.
Kebaya fashions in Java
By the later fifteenth century, elite Javanese women had adopted a loosely fitted jacket called a kebaya that was worn with a kemben, a chest-wrapping cloth, and a wrapped skirt, which could be a tubular sarong or a kain panjang, meaning a “long cloth” (Gittinger 1979). The word “kebaya” is derived from the Persian or Arabic languages with variants cabie and cabbay (OED 1989 s.v. kebaya). This case study explores the strands of trade and influence that produced the kebaya as worn in Java and elsewhere in the Malay Archipelago. Figure 6.6 shows a Javanese woman in the early twentieth century wearing a kebaya sarong ensemble.
Java is the capital island of Indonesia, a nation of thousands of islands, whose government formed in the mid-twentieth century based on the boundaries of the colonial Dutch domination that lasted from the seventeenth to the twentieth century (with brief interregna). As a crossroads between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and proximate to the southeast coasts of Asia, Indonesia’s culture reflects many influences prior to the arrival of Portuguese ships in 1512. When the Portuguese tried to assume control of the spice trade in Indonesia, some women on Java already wore a kebaya on their upper body. In 1602, the VOC (the Dutch East India Company) gained control of the islands, allowing the Muslim sultanates to continue, subject to the Dutch trading company’s overview.
How the kebaya came into use in Java remains unclear since several cultures were potential contributors to the transfer of the style to the island. Indonesians traded with societies in India and China by the middle of the first millennium, and perhaps much earlier given the proximity to their coasts. Some trade records survive from the late first millennium. A document written in stone and dated to 929 limited the amount that was imported without a levy. The text indicated active trade in textiles and clothing: “Those who carry their trade pikul (shoulder pole)—such as vendors of clothing . . . transporters of cotton (kapas) . . . [they shall be allowed up to] 5 bantal-weight per person” (Christie 1998: 370–71). Since the garments are not described, whether the clothing was cloth or sleeved jackets cannot be known. Chinese and Indians wore sleeved garments by this time, as did all of Eurasia. Such garments may have been imported, but surviving art works do not show Javanese men or women wearing them.
From shores farther to the west, Arab and Persian trade ships reached Java by the mid-seventh century (Donkin 2003). They brought a new faith—Islam—to Java, as did Muslim Chinese merchants who converted to the religion. The religion was firmly established in Java in the fifteenth century. Perhaps the kebaya served to provide body coverage to court women and other elites in reaction to the Islamic strictures for covering the body; apparently for this reason the Majahapit court (1293–1500) was the first to formally adopt the kebaya (Chavalit and Phromsuthirak 2000). When Zheng He visited the Majahapit kingdom in 1413, Ma Huang served as the voyage recorder. He described the court in detail noting that the men were bare chested and that the women wore a cloth wrapped around their chest and a wrapped skirt. All other garments worn by ethnic locals used uncut lengths of cloth wrapped, draped, or tied on the body (Ma [1433] 1970).
Figure 6.6 Portrait of a woman in sarong and kebaya with child. Dr. W. G. N. van der Sleen (Fotograaf/photographer). 1929. By permission of the Collection Nationaal Museu
m van Wereldculturen. Coll. no. TM-10027458. Reproduced by permission. The kebaya for women has roots in sleeved garments introduced through Chinese and Arabian traders before 1512. This jacket style continues today in fashionable women’s dress in the Malay Archipelago.
Ma Huang further noted that the people inhabiting the island included locals, Chinese and Arab merchants (Ma [1433] 1970). Arabs dressed in sleeved robes and, as noted previously in The Periplus, trade in sleeved garments was in place along the Arabian coast for centuries. Sleeved garments may have been exported to Java whether from China, India, or Arabian states. Alternatively, sleeved garments may have been sewn locally within the respective Arab and Chinese communities where they were worn.
Wearing the kebaya was established by the arrival of the Dutch; however, the style was not widespread among the native population. Many women continued to wear only a sarong or kain panjang, others added a kemben when that fashion spread beyond the court elites. Most of the female population also wore a slendang, or shoulder cloth, used for carrying items. Whether by emulation of the elites or by the influence of Islamic and Christian moral codes or both, by the late eighteenth century, the kebaya was widely adopted and became a site of fashion variation.
Rens Heringa (1997) called the kebaya and sarong combination a mestizo style as worn in the Pasisir, North Coast of Java in the nineteenth century. The North Coast was the location of entrepreneurial innovation in the batik industry for kain panjang (further discussed in Chapter 7). However, the multiple strands of influence present suggests that the concept of hybridity was deeply embedded in fashion as a whole and this played a part in the eventual role of the kebaya through the colonial era and into modern styling. In the nineteenth century the various ethnicities and strata had unique style concepts for their kebayas. The Javanese court and elites preferred velvet or patterned silks. Other Javanese wore sateen and various cotton cloths. In the Paranakan Chinese community, women learned embroidery, which they used to embellish their kebayas (Heringa 1997). Among the Indisch, or Dutch, kebayas were made of linen imported from Belgium with fine lace or other needlework trims.