Fashion History

by Linda Welters,Abby Lillethun

  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.

  Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Japan in 1853, opening its ports to trade with the West. During the Meiji period (1868–1912), sumptuary laws disappeared allowing all Japanese to wear the fashions that pleased them. Toby Slade (2009) and Penelope Francks (2015) have studied the fashions of the Meiji period, concluding that this is when Japan became integrated into a global fashion system. Urban men began wearing Western business suits while women continued to wear the kimono in the home. Women did not begin adopting Western styles until the 1910s. Words developed to distinguish Western-style dress (yôfuku) from Japanese dress (wafuku). Interestingly, kimono was not a word prior to the mid-nineteenth century; each type of kimono had its own name (van Assche 2010).

  Indian dress as fashion

  Indian dress evokes visions of the sari, dhoti, and salwar-kamiz. The sari, a four-to-nine-yard length of cloth draped on the body, is essentially the national dress of India. The dhoti, a man’s lower-body garment, is also an example of draped clothing. In fact, draping has been part of India’s way of dressing since 3000 BCE. The salwar-kamiz (pants and tunic), a product of sewn clothing, arrived much later with the advent of Islam (Dhamija 2010).

  India has a multiethnic cultural heritage from Central Asia. The Indian sub-continent is large with varied geography and climate, both of which contribute to a patchwork-like sartorial history. In terms of fashion, India reflects some of the same features that characterize other Asian countries: court systems with artisan workshops, sumptuary laws, and gradual adoption of the fashion process by commoners.

  India inherited Central Asia’s custom in ancient times of draping and wrapping lengths of woven cloth on the body. Already in the fourth century BCE, the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan court commented on the “flowing garments worn by both men and women, and printed and woven with gold, dyed in multiple colors, and draped a number of ways” (Dhamija 2010: 62).

  When stitched garments displaced drapery in the West, men in India adopted the tunic to wear over the dhoti. During the Gupta period (400–750 CE), stitched garments for women also entered the repertoire. These include the ghagra (skirt) and choli (blouse), worn with a veil. After 997 CE, Afghans, Turks, and Arabs introduced the Islamic religion along with Muslim dress habits. The practice of installing artisan ateliers in royal courts, customary for Islamic courts in Spain and Syria, was firmly in place in India by the fourteenth century. The historian Ibn Fadl Allah al-‘Umari wrote about the splendors of court dress, mentioning workshops for silks and brocades, linen imported from Russia and Egypt, and gold-embroidered robes in Persian style (Dhamija 2010).

  At the onset of Mughal rule in 1526, dress divided the country. Muslims wore tailored garments while Hindus wore unstitched clothing. Mughal rulers actively sought to fuse the two traditions in an attempt to harmonize cultural relations. Akbar the Great (1483–1530) imported master craftsmen from many countries, resulting in a panoply of styles. Mughal miniature paintings chart a variety of changing fashions that moved from court to upper- and middle-class commoners. Men’s fashion alternated between turbans and hats, beards and clean-shaven faces, knee-length and ankle-length tunics.

  Miniatures from the prolific Guler school illustrate classic Indian stories, and they show a wide variety of fashions. In the miniature illustrated in Figure 7.9, a man and woman are eyeing an approaching storm. The man wears a superfine white muslin jama (coat or tunic) over yellow payjama pants. It fastens to the right as per Mughal instructions for men of Muslim faith. A colorful sash with gold borders secures the jama. On his head, he wears a turban secured with a separate patterned textile. The woman wears a red choli and multicolored ghaghra seemingly constructed of horizontally sewn strips of cloth. A sheer dupatta (scarf) is draped across her chest, over the back of her head and down her left shoulder. She is barefoot, but her toes are stained red from henna or lac. Her arms are festooned with bangles, and she wears an armlet, earrings, rings, brooch, and a gold necklace. Bangles have been a feature of Indian women’s dress for millennia, as evidenced by female statues from 3000 BCE (Dhamija 2010).

  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.

  During the Mughal period, India experienced economic growth resulting in the rise of merchants and clerks who could afford modest luxury items. The fashion process was very much in evidence as clothes worn at court became the frame of reference. As Carlo Marco Belfanti notes: “Cycles of change in clothing taste did exist and that here was mature awareness of such a phenomenon” (2008: 425).

  The Age of Exploration brought Europeans to India as trading partners. Eventually the English colonized India, taking pains to distinguish themselves from the colonized by following Western styles of dress. Regional differences in Indian dress evolved with North India adhering to the Muslim tradition of salwar-kamiz for both men and women. Hindu women, on the other hand, wore a sari over the choli and petticoat. Since Independence (1947), fashion has existed in both these sartorial strands. Color, fabric, and embellishment introduce fashionability to the salwar-kamiz. The sari has a style history of its own with changes in type of fabric, pattern and color as well as length and method of draping. There are reportedly over 100 different ways to drape a sari. In the new millennium India has developed a full-blown fashion scene with strong fashion leadership coming from prominent politicians such as Indira Gandhi and Bollywood film stars (Banerjee and Miller 2003).

  Recent research by Arti Sandhu (2016) posits that India had fashion prior to the presence of the British during colonial rule. Before the nineteenth century, trade networks introduced variations on Chinese and Persian caps, trousers, tunics, and coats. Sophisticated networks of manufacturers and artisans spurred style innovations and changing patterns of consumption. When the British arrived, fashion change accelerated, but with unique responses fusing local with global. The tension between adopting modern Western styles of dress and retaining Indian garments for the sake of identity resulted in hybridity, a process that is still affecting fashion in India today.

  Fashion and Javanese batik design

  Design and production of batik cloths in Java illustrates a fashion process that emanated from the island’s Muslim courts. The nominally “forbidden” batik motifs of the courts flowed outward to the populace, and the heterogeneous coastal enclaves incorporated and innovated beyond the courtly traditions. Repetition and diagonal lines evoked a unified cosmology through water, earth, and sky motifs that permeate the designs. Despite these underlying precepts, the “main color and pattern styles” of batik from the North Coast and from Central Java “have never been static” (Heringa 2010: 128). The change that occurred from the court to the towns is a demonstration of fashion.

  Muslim sultanates established in Java in the early second millennium were either agrarian-based in the inland sectors, or sea trade-based on the coastline. The sultanate courts enfolded the already embedded Hindu-Buddhist beliefs concerning cosmology and the life cycle, and these concepts continue to influence Javanese arts. That scope of influence included textiles, wherein motifs and symbolic-spiritual beliefs attributed to cloth endured.

  When the VOC, aka the Dutch East India Company, took control of the archipelago in 1602, the Muslim sultanate courts—the reigning sultan, his wives and extended family, and courtiers—and the populace, became vassals in the service to the company’s usurpation of the natural re
sources, labor, and trade location (Taylor 2007). The VOC and later the Dutch government allowed the courts to continue since they served initially to stabilize the general population.

  In the late nineteenth century, Hamengku Buwono VII (1839–1931), sultan of Yogyakarta in Central Java from 1877 to 1920, sat for a portrait by Javanese photographer Kassian Céphas (Figure 7.10). The sultan’s garments included a silk patchwork jacket, batik trousers, and a batik wrapped skirt (kain panjang). His jacket was reportedly a copy of one Muhammad had bestowed on his ancestor, thus providing the dynasty’s sultans the right to reign (“Staatsiejas van de Sultan . . .” 2015). While the jacket provided Islamic authority, the batiks that the sultan wore provided connection to the long Hindu-Javanese heritage. The Muslim courts honored the batiks made in their own workshops above imported court cloths such as patolas (double ikat cloth), and single ikat. (In double ikat, both warp and weft yarns are resist dyed, resulting in complex patterning.) Thus, batiks were preferred to adorn court figures for formal ceremonies. The dotted grid design of the sultan’s batik trousers reflects order (Heringa 2010). Dot pattern batik is the region’s oldest batik tradition that used a pointed object such as a stick or metal tool to deposit hot wax dots on cloth to resist dye (Heringa 2010). The sultan’s kain panjang shows a batik method called batik tulis that is historically associated with the palace batik workshops. These workshops, run by the sultan’s head wife, created the highest quality batiks exclusively for the court (Gittinger 2005).

  Batik tulis uses a canting, a tool that draws designs in hot wax, which provides for flowing lines and elements, rather than designs comprised of dots (Gittinger 2005). The flowing serpentine design on the sultan’s kain panjang is parang rusak; parang refers to broken swords and suggests power. The parang rusak worn by Hamengku Buwono VII is the large size parang that was reserved for sultans. The batik cloths that he wears may be presumed to reflect the color palette found in extant court batiks that used locally available natural dyes. The light tone is the beige cotton ground that was soaked in oil and washed to facilitate the smooth flow of hot wax on the cloth. The natural dye colors of soga (browns from soga tree bark), saturated indigo, and plum red (from the morinda citrifolia tree) were also used in homemade batiks. Thus, the sultan’s garments dressed him as the pinnacle of Java-ness, enrobed in textiles that symbolized power and lasting heritage. In her historical study of batiks, Heringa notes that Central Java court batik designs have become increasingly abstracted (2010: 130), yet they also use the ancient motifs.

  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.

  Specific batik motifs used by the Central Javanese courts, such as the parang and kawung (a stylized cross section of an oval palm fruit representing fertility), were forbidden for commoners’ use (Pemberton 1994; Taylor 2007). However, in emulation of court elites, forbidden designs were in use more broadly by the nineteenth century. An example that parallels Hamengku Buwono VII’s portrait is found in a woman’s fashionable sarong dated 1890. The sarong from the North Coast of Java is made using the batik tulis technique and it includes six wide diagonal parang bands (Heringa and Veldhuisen 1996: 124–25). The design reveals the chasing of elite motifs by a person of lesser status; the sarong was made in a commercial batik factory, not in a court workshop. The 1890 sarong further portrays engagement in fashion through motifs of lilies and chrysanthemums, flowers that grow in a temperate European climate. The floral designs, part of a popular trend, present innovation as well as local group identity. The final edicts restricting use of court batik patterns occurred in 1927, well after the public had adopted them for their own use (Heringa 2010: 180). The desire of the non-regal public to wear batik, which was expensive, and presumably incorporated the restricted motifs, was facilitated by the innovation of the cap, a copper stamp. After its arrival, male workers stamped hot wax onto the cloth and thus the batik patterning process was accelerated at lower labor costs; batiks became more widely worn (Taylor 2007). Another factor coalesced to democratize the wearing of batik in addition to the technique of stamping the pattern onto the cloth in a factory-like setting instead of hand drawing it in an artisan workshop: the arrival of machine-made cotton cloth from Europe, whose fineness and regularity greatly eased the achievement of sharp, evenly printed designs (Gittinger 2005: 45). As a result of these factors, batik quickly became the everyday wear for people of all classes (Taylor 2007: 105).

  Batik sarongs, including the 1890 sarong discussed previously, that emerged in the nineteenth century from the ethnic mélange on the North Coast of Java, incorporate naturalistic motifs that represent water, earth, and sky, such as crabs, flowering plants, and butterflies (Heringa 2010). Such naturalistic motifs might appear as the foreground to a grid or an all-over pattern of forbidden kawung motifs. While keeping those concepts, entrepreneurs who produced batiks departed from the local natural dye color palette and showcased greens, yellows, oranges, pinks, and lavenders from newly introduced synthetic dyes from the mid-nineteenth century forward (Heringa and Veldhuisen 1996; Veldhuisen 1993).

  Also called the Pasisir (coastline), the north coast included communities of Javanese, Chinese, Indo-Arabians, Indo-Europeans, and the Paranakan (mixed ethnicities). Batik made in that thriving batik tulis industry is referred to as batik Pasisir. Designed for the various ethnic identities and faiths living there, batik Pasisir were often signed by the women entrepreneurs, lending cachet based on branding; a local sarong fashion system took root in the Pasisir and lasted into the 1930s. The subset of Indo-European batik manufacturers incorporated European motifs, as mentioned previously, and these batiks are called batik Belanda. Surviving examples show lace patterns, human figures, and a panoply of Europe’s flora and fauna (Heringa and Veldhuisen 1996; Veldhuisen 1993). One may imagine the dynamic and competitive environment for makers and consumers alike, as the attributes of batiks were evaluated and purchased in pursuit of fashionability.

  These examples illuminate fashion in a range of Asian contexts. Despite the reports of observers whose ethnocentric and/or naive perception led them to see Asian dress as unchanging, that was not the case. Fashion resided in these cultures on terms shaped by each culture; leadership from Europe was unneeded.

  8

  ALTERNATIVE FASHION HISTORIES IN EURO-AMERICA

  At that time much wickedness began to prevail . . . . The men attached to the military service first set the example of departing from the habits of their fathers in their dress and manner of wearing the hair, which was soon followed by the burghers and country folk, and almost all the common people.

  ORDERIC VITALIS

  The Benedictine monk Orderic Vitalis wrote these words about the rapid adoption of a new fashion in 1089, just a few decades after the Battle of Hastings (Vitalis [1075–1143] 1854: 9). His Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, compiled from contemporary historical sources, is considered to be a reliable source of Anglo-Norman society in medieval Europe.

  The quotation speaks to the mechanics of a fashion system in which an admired stratum of society, in this case knights, changed their style of dress from that worn by the previous generation. Others rapidly imitated the new style until everyone had copied it. What was so novel about this youthful new look? Contemporaries complained about long trailing sleeves, shoes with pointed toes, and straggly hair.

  The date of this incident of fashionable behavior trickling down from the elite to the common people highlights the need to rethink the origins of fashion in the West. As discussed below, many standard fashion histories have fingered the middle o
f the fourteenth century as the period in which fashion began in Europe. The quotation above proves that assumption wrong. Dating fashion’s birth to ca. 1350 is just one of the fallacies refuted in this chapter.

  Another mistaken assumption is that peasants, or country folk, did not participate in a fashion system. In this fallacy, fashion practice occurred only among the elite in urban settings. It links the history of fashion to the history of capitalism and the rise of a market economy in medieval Europe. This narrow version of dress history ignores what most Europeans wore.

  In this chapter, we explore how the notion that fashion began in mid-fourteenth-century Europe became embedded in the scholarly literature. We then offer selected examples of fashionable behavior prior to the mid-1300s in Europe, and among cultures in Europe and America long thought to wear unchanging “traditional” dress or to have limited options to act on their fashion impulses.

  The problem of “The Birth of Fashion”

  Costume history literature, particularly textbooks, make the claim that fashion began in the fourteenth century. Further, as noted in Chapter 1, the literature firmly equates the wearing of fashion with Western Europe’s urban culture. Chapter 4, in Part 1, expands on some of the reasons why this happened by presenting a historiography of fashion history from the European perspective. In this chapter, we explore how this claim came to be and provide examples to refute the claim.

  That fashion began in Western Europe sometime in the Middle Ages permeates the literature published from the late 1960s until the present. How did this widely accepted premise get started? Pre-1960s authors do not observe or comment on the beginnings of fashion. For those authors, the goal was to chronicle the changes in “costume” over time in one geographical area, Europe. For example, titles such as Joan Evans’s Dress in Mediaeval France describe increasingly rapid changes in French dress after 1100, noting that the appearance of new styles accelerated in the period 1320–80 (Evans 1952). To explain the quickening pace of change, Evans cited the emergence of fitted garments such as the pourpoint, an example of which survives in the Musée des Tissues et des Arts Décoratifs in Lyon, France. It belonged to Charles de Blois, who died in 1364, shortly after the pourpoint had been made. Evans also noted the appearance of extremisms in dress such as shoes with long pointed toes known as poulaines, which became very popular in the second half of the fourteenth century. Parti-colored hose, assembled from two or more different-colored fabrics, also served as an example; young men in the French court wore these. But nowhere did Evans state that this period in time was the “birth of fashion.” In fact, she employs the word “fashion” to mean a change in style, and she applies it to dress before 1340. To wit: “A little before 1100 a change of fashion becomes evident in civil dress” (4).