Fashion History
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Ancient Greek (800 BCE–146 BCE) dress forms, based upon textiles woven to size for the individual, were draped and wrapped on the body. Pins, buttons, belts, and some sewing kept garments in place. Over time the rectangular forms of the garments were rather stable, and this lack of fast-moving change contributed to the interpretation that ancient Greek dress was not fashion. However, change occurred in textile width and length, textile decoration, forms of overfolds and blousing, and belting, such as high on the ribs, low on the hips, and so on. The chiton, the ubiquitous gown-like garment, varied in width. In the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, the Doric version was woven on a narrower loom and slim on the body, while the later Ionic style of lighter weight textiles was constructed on wider looms and consequently more voluminous on the body. While much more research is needed to better understand the variations of fashion in antiquity, it is already clear that fashion change occurred in ancient Greece.
Mary Harlow and Marie-Louise Nosch (2014) discuss the apparent stasis in Greek clothing shapes, but assert that among scholars studying Greek dress and textiles, “many (including ourselves) take it for granted that ideas of fashion existed” (22) in antiquity. Drawing on Sheila Dillon’s (2010) analysis of Hellenistic portrait statues, Harlow and Nosch point out that changes in ways of draping and a range of choices of material and colors were the means of expressing fashion. Dillon characterized the trend for new transparent mantles, or long rectangular wraps, in the Hellenistic era. Representation of goddesses of the time maintained unchanging, or “conservative,” dress (64), but many Hellenistic portrait statues of elite women diverged from the goddesses’ classical styles. Portrait statues show the elite subjects with a transparent, thin mantle draped snuggly about the arms and shoulders, and falling at the ends over the chiton’s heavier textile. On observing one of these portrait statues, one may see through the outer mantle’s sheer weave to the fabric underneath it. Dillon suggests that the thin mantles were made “of fine Coan silk or Egyptian linen” (100). The style “was more common in the Greek East (e.g., Magnesia, Kos, Pergamon, Rhodes), which Dillon interprets to indicate a taste that diverged from the conservative dress worn in Athens to the more liberal west” (100). The new sheer mantle broadcast one’s wealth and ability to access luxurious finely woven textiles of soft fibers. Research on scant remains of pigment on statues, which were once painted, suggests that pastel tones graced the elite women’s mantles (Østergaard 2010). Employing Heller’s observation that “fashion is born whenever you study it” (2007: 47), and in agreement with Harlow and Nosch, we suggest that in Hellenistic Greece, women expressed fashion through the textile weight, fiber, weave, and color of their mantles.
Imperial Roman culture identified itself as superior to the cultures that it encountered and/or dominated. This primacy concept included valuing Roman appearance maintained through social constructs and expectations of conformity. Standards included the culture’s garments and accessories, the mode of wearing them, cleanliness, and hairstyles. Citizenship, a critical element of status, was made obvious through hairstyles that distinguished between Roman citizens and those from other cultures. Roman men were differentiated from the “barbarians” (foreigners), who often wore long hair, by wearing short-length hairstyles. Roman women engaged in wearing elaborate coiffures.
Scholarly literature on dress and appearance in imperial Rome notes the expression of fashion by women (van Driel Murray 1987; Olson 2002), including pursuit of up-to-date hairstyles (Bartman 2001; Furnée-van Zwet 1956). In imperial Rome, which was a conservative time, a Roman woman’s hairstyle displayed her wealth and status through its intricacy (Bartman 2001: 1–5). It also denoted her conformity to prevailing status markers and taste (Bartman 2001: 1, 8–9). Imperial Roman women’s hairstyles survive in statuary, portrait busts, and hairstyling scenes in funerary stelae, allowing for a close analysis of styles and thus to their actual existence rather than being interpreted as merely imaginary (Bartman 2001: 8l ). Archaeological funerary remains also inform understanding of the styles. Such artifacts include bodkins, or thick needles—plain and decorated—crafted in glass, ivory, or bone that are now interpreted to have been used to secure a hairstyle using sewing with yarns (Stephens 2008). Nets, including ones of gold such as those found at Vetralla, Via Tiburtina, and Vallerano, Tombs 2–4, covered a bun or part of a style.
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.
A Roman woman’s engagement in her toilette signified appropriate feminine behavior. Attaining the intricate hairstyle would require an ornatrix, a slave trained to do hairstyling. This would have been the case for Vibia Matidia (85–165 CE), who wore the Flavian hairstyle (Figure 8.2). The Flavian style separated the hair into front and back sections. The front hair, styled in a crescent of tight curls about the wearer’s face from ear to ear, extended five inches high or more in the center front. An armature or support may have been used to hold it up. The hair combed to the back was formed into a bun, probably using a bodkin and wool yarn to secure it. Possibly, hairpieces added to the front and the back sections helped to execute the Flavian style (Bartman 2001: 10). The very wealthy were not the only fashion followers; freed woman Vibia Drosis’s self-commissioned funerary stele shows her wearing the Flavian style, although the style was executed with less finesse than that of Vibia Matidia (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, AE 1992.202-204).
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.
The elaborate hairstyles of the Flavian and Antonine dynasties (96–192 CE) used dyes and false hair. In the first quarter of the second century, false hair in colors that were not a match to the wearer’s color gave focus to a style’s complexity (Bartman 2001: 7). Braids made of hair or wool and approximately a half inch wide cover the hairline in many bust portraits of Antonine women and are assumed to show a real style detail. Women used dyes such as henna for reddish tones and saffron for golden ones to alter their own hair color.
In the Severan Dynasty (193–212 CE), Empress Julia Domna (170–217 CE) wore a wig, called a capillamentum. One of her bust portraits shows a wisp of hair at the hairline that is not apparently from the wig (Figure 8.3). Such bust portraits highlight the social importance of following hair fashions with precision, even while Roman garments changed little.
These examples of fashion in antiquity range from the extremely subtle to the boldly obvious. Wearing a delicate pastel mantle in Hellenistic Greece showed that the wearer was aware of the new trend in mantles and with it she could display her fashionability. Likewise, traced over 200 years, the intricate Imperial Roman hairstyles reveal changing fashion. Fashion’s temporal framework extends well before the Middle Ages and to non-capitalistic societies.
Excluding the non-elite from fashion
Fashion history has an extensive record of focusing on the dress of the elite. Prior to 1800, surviving examples of dress are rare, and these most often represent the attire of the nobility and landed families. Evidence favors the wealthy who could afford to have their portraits painted, who could store out-of-date clothing in their ancestral houses, and who—as educated, literate people—penned observations about dress practices in letters and journals. Peripheral to the fashion discourse have been the dress practices of the common people in England, the so-called folk of Europe, and slaves from Africa in antebellum America and the Caribbean. This section presents selected examples from those cultures that exemplify participation in a fashion system, whether localized or transnational.
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veryday fashion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England
Economic historian Beverly Lemire has argued persuasively about the fashion change that occurred in England when printed cottons arrived from India in the seventeenth century (Lemire 2011). After the Dutch, French, and British East India companies began transporting Indian calicoes to Europe, a consumer revolution occurred. In England, women from “many social milieus engaged in creative self-fashioning” by buying and displaying gowns, petticoats, jackets, handkerchiefs, stockings, beribboned caps, and hats (Lemire 2011: 50). The new calicoes from India offered advantages over the alternatives—wool and silk—in that they were washable and inexpensive. Unlike domestic printed linens and fustians (cotton/linen fabrics), the colors were bright and colorfast. The importation of Indian calicoes threatened domestic textile production of wool fabrics upon which England depended. The silk weavers of Spitalfields, who supplied the wealthy with dress and furnishing fabrics, also felt the squeeze. Anti-calico sentiment soon developed and created a mass hysteria during which angry weavers tore printed cotton gowns off the backs of women walking in the street. In 1721, Parliament passed a law banning Indian textiles. Similar laws had been enacted in France in 1686, where not only the import of Indian textiles but also the domestic printing of cotton was banned. The French also banned importation of Chinese silk textiles to protect their silk-weaving industry. The bans eventually were lifted in both countries—1759 in France, 1774 in England—which allowed the development of French and English textile printing industries. In England, a partial lifting of the ban in 1736 allowed English printers to print on mixed cotton/linen fabrics. The increased availability of printed cottons lowered the price, allowing people from all social levels to acquire this new fashionable material.
We relate this history of Indian cottons because it provides an example counter to the usual dissemination of fashion at the time, which was from the monarchs and courtiers to the lesser nobility and then to merchants, artisans, and yeoman, finally ending at the low end of the social scale in a watered-down form. The rapid acceptability of printed cottons for women’s gowns and neckerchiefs and men’s banyans happened across social strata. Both mistress and maid wore gowns of similar fabrics. What distinguished status were the small niceties and accessories. Even a small border of calico on a plain petticoat allowed common women to participate in fashion.
John Styles’s multiyear study showed how, beginning in 1660, ordinary English people enjoyed access to new fabrics and fashion. These included the aforementioned calico gowns and neckerchiefs for women and watches and wigs for men (Styles 2007). Styles used a wide variety of documentary records to support his points: travelers’ accounts, court records of clothing thefts, fugitive ads, and an array of account books. His study focused on the lower half of society. Travelers to various parts of England observed the high quality of everyday clothing. Articles in the press complained that people were dressing above their station. Even for the working poor, propriety and fashion were important. Nowhere is this more evident than in the billet books of London’s Foundling Hospital, which survive from 1741 to 1760. Clerks snipped small swatches from the clothing of infants dropped off at the hospital by impoverished mothers to provide identification if someone came back for a child; the swatches were attached to records along with written descriptions of the fabrics. The textiles, which may have been recycled from adult clothing, included calicoes, flowered silks, embroidered flannels, and silk ribbons.
Studies like those of Lemire and Styles enrich our understanding of the history of fashion among England’s majority, not just the elite.
Folk dress
Folk dress, also described as peasant dress, rural dress, national dress, ethnic dress, or traditional dress, is associated with rural Europe and has long been considered separate from fashion. Scholars of Western dress and fashion pointedly exclude European folk dress from their research. Mary Ellen Roach and Kathleen Musa, who headed up a project funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities, explained European folk dress as slow-changing garb that is bound in custom rather than the continual change that characterizes Western fashionable dress. They noted that rural dwellers used dress to “identify with their own small groups rather than respond to changes in Western fashionable dress” (Roach and Musa 1980: 2). Therefore, the authors chose to “omit European peasant dress from the definition of Western dress” along with all dress styles originating outside of Europe (Roach and Musa 1980: 3).
The notion of fashion being only Western and urban has also influenced the study of fashion history in textbooks. Indeed, Phyllis Tortora and Sara Marcketti’s Survey of Historic Costume reiterates the separation of folk dress from fashionable dress. The authors state: “Although folk dress has sometimes influenced fashionable dress and fashionable elements may appear in folk styles, folk dress in western Europe diverges from the mainstream of fashionable dress and is not covered in this book; it is too complex and varied a subject to be included in a general survey of western dress” (Tortora and Marcketti 2015: 10). Course titles at American colleges and universities reflect this division: “history of costume” (or “fashion” or “Western dress”) versus “ethnic dress.” Only in recent years have scholars begun to question these maxims.
One of the authors of this book, Welters, has conducted research on folk dress in two geographically separate parts of Europe, Greece and Latvia. Their sociopolitical history is quite different, but fashion played a part in the rural cultures of both countries.
In Greece, Welters visited villages in Attica, a region that surrounds and includes Athens. In the 1800s, northern Europeans and Americans visited the Attica villages on the Grand Tour because of their proximity to Athens. Some of these visitors observed and collected local dress of village women, providing us with temporal evidence. The outfits worn by the women in these villages consisted of long sleeveless dresses lavishly embroidered at the hems, sleeved over-bodices, and sleeveless wool jackets. The embroideries are immediately identifiable as coming from the Attica villages, yet the variations show individuality. After studying museum examples and talking to villagers, Welters concluded that one of the main factors explaining the variety was that some embroidery designs were older than others (Welters 1988: 70). In other words, the preferred colors and designs changed over time. The embroideries could be roughly broken down into four time periods based on their design characteristics: late eighteenth century to the 1830s, 1840–1875, 1875–1910, and 1910–1935. When shown photographs of museum pieces, the interviewees themselves pointed out that some designs were older than others. They often described the changes in embroidery design as generational. As one woman in the village of Menidi explained, “The dark colored embroideries were the ones worn by our great grandmothers” (interview, July 7, 1983).
The notion of generational change bears further consideration. In subsequent research in Greece, Welters heard women explain their clothing choices as dependent on their generational cohort. They would say things like: “These were the clothes of our grandmothers,” or “This was worn by my mother’s generation.” They would claim: “My sister who was older than me wore that style,” but “We didn’t wear such things.” The custom of assembling a lifelong wardrobe around the time a woman married guaranteed generational change. Girls approaching marriageable age began assembling their dowries, which included clothing, even before they were engaged. Great effort and expense went into young women’s bridal attire, and the latest materials and styles were employed (Figure 8.4). The couple in the photograph were high-status individuals within their village as can be seen in the amount of jewelry adorning the bride as well as the elegant ensemble worn by the groom. After marriage, women wore what they had in their dowries, replacing worn pieces when necessary. Women with children wore age-appropriate clothing with subdued colors and embellishment. To summarize, it was the young women approaching marriageable age who were the change agents for their generation.
Style leadershi
p, a feature of fashion systems, also impacted clothing choices in Greek villages. Young women wanted to look like the other young women in their village and nearby villages, and thus they conformed to the current ideals. The interviewees consistently explained differences as driven by what other girls were wearing. They noted fashion leaders in their villages who influenced other women’s fashion choices. For example, a woman in Koropi who had worked as a tailor said: “One show-off came out and said she wasn’t going to wear the griza [sleeveless wool overcoat] and the others followed” (interview, June 22, 1983). Prior to its demise, the griza had gone through its own generational changes. It began as a garment made from homespun wool with dark homespun wool embroidery, eventually becoming a showy jacket made from imported red and white English broadcloth embellished in gold thread. The propensity to add gold thread to the griza intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century; some grizes were covered in gold.
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.
Change could also come from outside the community. Urban styles were modified and adapted in folk dress for short periods of time. One of these was the hoop petticoat popular in Western fashion in the 1860s. Village women in Attica began wearing hoops under their bridal and festival dresses toward the end of the nineteenth century. Some of the interviewees criticized one of the museum post cards, complaining that the dresser had forgotten to put the hoop on the mannequin. The rounded shapes created by hooped petticoats eventually disappeared from folk dress as they did from fashion. Another urban style that was incorporated into the Attica folk dress was the long frilly white apron. This style, popular in the early 1900s, might have been adapted from the white cotton lingerie dresses worn by urban women at the time. Numerous photographs dating from the early twentieth century show long white aprons covering the embroidered hems of engaged girls’ chemises.