Fashion History
Page 24
Museums are also turning attention to the “Interwoven Globe,” which was the title of an exhibition and catalog on the worldwide textile trade from 1500 to 1800 (Peck 2013). Numerous studies on the spread of specific styles and commodities, some of which are cited elsewhere in this book, have also aided our understanding of the relationship of fashion and globalization since the late 1500s.
Here we describe selected interactions of non-Western and Western cultures that reveal the complexities and fluidities of fashion systems in the era of globalization. After the turn of the millennium, it is no longer accurate to separate the West from the rest. Local fashion contexts almost inevitably connect to the external or global world through complex trade networks, travel and tourism, and satellite and internet access to visual media, to mention a few of the ways that humans interact with cultures beyond their own. Benefits include understanding the economic variability of world markets and appreciating the sheer inventiveness of the human mind, particularly those from outside the expressions of a person’s own society.
Fashion in Polynesia: Hawai’i
As observed by the authors cited above—Zelinsky, Ross, and DuPlessis—Christian missionaries introduced Euro-American styles to converts in China, India, Japan, and other places where they were sent to Christianize native peoples. The Polynesian Hawaiian archipelago presents an example par excellence.
Captain James Cook, a British explorer, and his crew landed in Hawai’i in 1778, the first Westerners to do so. He and his men commented on the dress of the natives, which included feather capes, helmet-like headdresses, ornaments, tattoos, and wrapped garments made from tree bark (Samwell [1788] 1967). Many Polynesian cultures make bark cloth, which resembles flexible parchment. Hawaiian women made the cloth by stripping the bark from the paper mulberry tree, beating it into felted sheets and decorating it by applying geometric patterns. The designs resembled those used for their tattoos (Arthur 2010). Native Hawaiians wore this cloth—called kapa—by wrapping it around the lower body. Men wore it as a loincloth while women layered it like a skirt, wearing from “one to ten layers” at a time (Arthur 1997: 131).
No written evidence prior to Cook’s arrival exists, but documents penned by Westerners who visited the islands after 1788 indicate that a local fashion system existed. Dress operated as a status marker that signified the difference between royalty and commoners, and the kings and queens initiated all new styles. The sandalwood trade that commenced in 1810 brought many Western goods to the islanders, including cloth (Arthur 1997). From the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, kapa went through several stylistic changes before it was completely replaced for use as clothing by woven cloth. Kapa artisans made the sheets thinner and the designs smaller than before as evidenced by comparing nineteenth-century examples to those collected in the late eighteenth century (Kaeppler 1980). Figure 9.1 is an illustration of Queen Ka’ahumanu in 1816 prior to the arrival of American missionaries. She wears a wrapped skirt of bark cloth decorated with rows of moderately sized geometric designs. Her ample body displays a Polynesian preference for corpulence, viewed as beautiful within Hawaiian culture (Teilhet-Fisk 1999).
Figure 9.1 Queen Ka’ahumanu, 1816. Original artwork by Louis Choris. Reproduced photographically by J. J. Williams with charcoal work by J. Ewing. Courtesy of Hawai’i State Archives, Digital Collection, PP-96-6-004. The Hawaiian queen is wearing a wrapped skirt of bark cloth.
When American missionaries arrived in 1820, they expressed shock at the half-naked dress of the Hawaiian natives; meanwhile, the local elite admired the empire-waisted dresses then in fashion among the missionary women. The empire style’s bodice reached to just below the bust, and the skirt of the dress extended from the elevated waistline to the ankle. The dresses worn by the missionaries had long sleeves. The dowager queen Kalakua requested such a dress for herself, but because of her large size, the dress style was modified to fall straight from the shoulders to the ankle instead of from under the bust. That dress style, which replaced bark cloth skirts by the mid-1800s, became known as the holokū (Arthur 1997: 131).
Holokū remained fashionable for decades, with changes to fabrics and details. Black silk gained popularity after one queen favored it for her dresses. In the 1850s, some royal Hawaiians began wearing Western fashions when out in public, but holokū while at home. In the 1870s, trains were added, and in the 1890s leg-of-mutton sleeves (Arthur 1997: 134). Holokū styles reflected varied aspects of European fashions observed in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century, adaptation to the tubular silhouette showed continued response to changes in European fashion.
A photograph of Lucy Muolu Moehonua dated ca. 1853 shows how the holokū was blended with local and imported styles to create a distinctive look (see Figure 9.2). Lucy wore a shawl, a black lace mantilla, a velvet choker, earrings, brooch, and a ring on her left hand, all of Euro-American origin. But she has added her own uniquely Hawaiian elements by wearing fresh flowers in her hair and a lei (flower garland) around her neck.
These examples illustrate that the fashion impulse was alive and well in the Hawaiian Islands, both in native-made kapa and in the Western-introduced holokū. Both the quality and the quantity of kapa signified status among Hawaiians prior to the arrival of Westerners. Immediately afterward, kapa underwent changes to make it thinner with smaller-scale designs perhaps in response to printed cottons. The modifications made to missionary women’s dresses for use by Hawaiian women created the holokū, which demonstrated stylistic changes of its own in response to shifts in Western silhouettes. Further, the photograph of Lucy Muolu Moehonua displays self-fashioning in a local-global context.
Local-global style in sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa has a complex textile heritage that includes both locally made textiles in many varieties and imported textiles. Dress styles include both wrapping cloth on the body and tailored or sewn garments. Across many centuries, trans-Saharan trade brought commodities, including textiles, from North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, which as described in Chapter 6 enjoyed trade with regions to the East by land and sea. Textiles came to West Africa along transcontinental trade routes that linked to the East Coast’s sea trade with the Asian kingdoms on the Indian Ocean. In the fifteenth century, Portuguese ships arrived on the coast of West Africa sometimes referred to as the Slave Coast. The captains traded with local chiefs, exchanging colorful cloths for slaves (Hopkins 1973). Inventories included “Indian chintz, silk socks from Nepal, Bengali fabrics, Arabic linen, and Schlesinger cloth” (Sylvanus 2016: 53). The observations of native women’s dress practices made by Willem Bosman, chief merchant of the Dutch West India Company, in 1705, reveal their commitment to elaborate dressing, replete with voluminous wrapped garments, lace embellishments, fine silks, and armbands of silver, gold, and ivory. He wrote: “These Female Negroes, I can assure you, are so well-skilled in their Fashions, that they know how to dress themselves up sufficiently tempting to lure several Europeans” (Bosman 1705: 121). Sylvanus concluded that “Africans tapped into imperial spheres of circulation, extracted their visual signifiers, and assembled them with local references to form a distinctive image culture” (Sylvanus 2016: 55). In a similar way, in regions influenced by Islam, inhabitants adapted locally made textiles to Muslim clothing consisting of loose robes with sleeves and turbans. Some African societies structured these robes by sewing narrow strip-woven cloth lengths together, for example, the tobe illustrated in Figure 4.5.
Figure 9.2 “Portrait of Lucy Muolu Moehonua,” ca. 1853. Daguerreotype by Hugo Stangenwald. Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library. This young Hawaiian woman is wearing a missionary-designed holokū dress, shawl, black lace mantilla, velvet choker, earrings, brooch, and other jewelry. She has fresh flowers in her hair and around her neck.
Somali dress is another example that can be viewed as emblematic of globalization (Akou 2011). After European trade commenced around 1800, Somali nomads rapidly adopted white factory-w
oven cotton imported from India, England, and America in place of their locally produced goat-leather garments. Termed merikani, the cloth was sometimes colored with natural dyes to resemble leather. European caravans traded glass beads, but learned that preferred colors and styles changed frequently.
One of the commodities brought to West Africa by European ships was hand-loomed Indian madras, a tightly woven cotton cloth in checks or plaids. The Kalabari women of Nigeria, rather than wearing the cloth “as is,” refashioned it by cutting away threads in intricate designs to create a lightweight, lacy fabric. The cloth is known as pelete bite, or cut-thread cloth. The process of manipulating this imported cloth generated a theory termed cultural authentication. The theory identifies four stages through which a material product from one culture emerges as meaningful in another culture. The stages of cultural authentication include selection, characterization, incorporation, and transformation (Erekosima and Eicher 1981). Extant cloth and biographies of female Kalabari artisans, however, indicate that the fashion process was also at work (Eicher and Erekosima 1982).
The oldest known pelete bite cloth was cut in the 1830s in the city of Buguma in the Niger Delta (Eicher 2014). More recent cloths show the development of a range of designs that have names drawn from nature (tiger’s paws, tortoise bones), but also English vocabulary (wineglass, cross). Women learn to cut pelete bite by apprenticing with established artisans or by observing them at work. Some originate new designs. Amonia Akoko, for example, developed the “comb” design after learning how to cut from her grandmother (Eicher and Erekosima 1982). In Figure 9.3, she holds one of her creations while wearing a pelete bite wrapper that she designed herself (Eicher 2014).
Both men and women wear pelete bite as wrappers. Because of the time that goes into cutting the threads of the cloth and the resultant cost, pelete bite accompanies special occasions, such as funerals, and is given as gifts. Interestingly, foreign traders observed the value attached to this cloth and began making machine-cut cloth to sell to the Kalabari, an example of an imported cloth transformed into a local cloth that is copied by foreign manufacturers for sale to the local market (Eicher and Erekosima 1982 :10).
Figure 9.3 Nigerian pelete bite (cut-thread cloth). Buguma, Nigeria. Photograph by Joanne B. Eicher. Amonia Akoko, a Kalabari woman, is holding a length of pelete bite. She is also wearing a wrapper of pelete bite of her own design.
Indonesian textiles experienced a similar process in Africa as an in-demand textile that European manufacturers imitated and replaced in the market. Batik cloths probably arrived on the African west coast via Portuguese or Dutch ships: the Dutch trading companies traded along the Slave Coast for 300 years and Indonesia for nearly as long (Sylvanus 2016). Batik cloth from Indonesia engaged the taste of coastal Africans, and trade in handmade batiks ensued, but by the late nineteenth century, replacements took hold. Batik cloths, described in Chapter 7, contain patterns created by using wax to resist dye. Wax, applied by a drawing tool or a stamp, prevents the cloth covered by the wax from receiving color. The wax is then removed and the process is repeated for additional colors. The use of wax to resist dye absorption also produces veins of color in the cloth; the dye reaches the cloth through cracks in the wax resist. This “aesthetics of imperfection” and the hand or feel of the cloth that results from the use of wax indicate authenticity (Sylvanus 2016: 57).
In the mid-nineteenth century, European cloth printing innovations prompted the development of machine-printed, or faux, batik. European traders eagerly offered these to the African and Asian markets. The first European machine-printed batik cloth was actually only partially mass manufactured. Machine- woven cotton cloth was first roller printed with a wax resist, then dyed, then the wax was removed, and lastly the cloth was block printed to add additional patterns and colors (Steiner 1985). The most suc cessful imitation batik company is Vlisco Ltd., which had traded Indonesian handmade batiks in prior centuries. Vlisco’s factory in Holland began producing machine batik cloth in 1914 and continues to serve the African market in the twenty-first century (Sylvanus 2016: 62). The company initiated and maintained constant consultation with its African consumers. Now called “wax-print” cloth, the design development responds to the changing tastes of West and Central African consumers. Thus, the faux batik trade to West Africa is another example of globalization where a foreign-manufactured product must keep generating new designs to meet the desire for changing fashions on a local level.
Another wrinkle in the fabric of African fashion history is the rapid increase in secondhand clothes from Western countries since the early 1990s. Karen Tranberg Hansen’s review of the history of the used clothing market suggests that the trade is not new. Europeans transported new and used clothing to West African ports intended both for trade and to clothe slaves, probably since the sixteenth century (Hansen 2000: 8–12). For centuries, the used clothing trade had been a viable way of acquiring a wardrobe inexpensively in the West; if not up-to-the-moment fashion-wise, at least the clothes were presentable. Secondhand clothing served local markets in major metropolitan areas in the West, and it reached rural areas through peddlers. But with the decreasing prices of clothing in the late twentieth century, consumers in Europe and the United States sped up their fashion consumption, casting off clothes that were barely worn. Many companies specializing in the secondhand clothing trade sprang up, and began shipping 500-pound bales of used clothing to developing countries, notably countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Central America. Entrepreneurs in places like Zambia purchased bales, and then sorted and sold this clothing in open markets and boutiques. Hansen (2000) researched this trade and its effect on African dress practices in Zambia. In parts of Zambia, secondhand clothing from Western countries is called salaula, which means “to select from a bale in the manner of rummaging” (Hansen 2000: 69). Hansen pointed out that “past and present, people in Zambia want to wear clothes that make them look good” (Hansen 2000: 250). Secondhand fashion allows participation in global fashion.
Resistance to globalization materialized in Africa around the practice of fashion, notably the desire to wear Western styles. After independence in the 1960s and 1970s, some African countries banned the importation of used clothing as well as new clothing from Western countries because it hurt local textile and clothing production (Gott 2010). Especially in West Africa, with its rich history of innovative textile production, local tailors and dressmakers transitioned from copying Western styles to creating unique designs. Leslie W. Rabine examined fashion and “tradition” in late-twentieth-century Senegal, a nation that was known at that time for fashionability (and remains so today). She observed that the fashion system involved negotiating tradition, modernity, and faith (Christian or Muslim) in the hybrid fashions that incorporated textiles from local dyers, imported wax prints, and locally executed needlework (Rabine 2002).
Currently, fashion designers in many African countries market their creations through local fashion weeks. Victoria L. Rovine, chronicler and interpreter of contemporary and historic African textiles and fashion artistry, endorses Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of “contamination” (Rovine 2015: 26). Appiah (2005) uses fashion as an emblem of contamination, pointing out that cross-cultural transfer results in innovations that enrich and transform people’s lives. Using Appiah’s terminology, contamination has long been present in Africa as a result of the globalization of fashion.
The street fashion phenomenon made its mark in twenty-first-century Africa. Finnish photographer Joona Pettersson (2016) captured looks of men and women in Benin and Dakar. In 2006, in South Africa, Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko snapped original looks in Johannesburg (Enwezor 2006). Her subjects included a group of four young men—Kepi, Sibu, Floyd, and Sabo—from Soweto who received fashion school training. A fashion design collaborative, they call themselves Smarteez. In 2012, they appeared in Scott Schuman’s blog The Sartorialist. They continue to produce their fashion designs. Such recent African street fashions and those o
f emerging designers reflect the differentiation commonly observed in youth fashions. Innovative combinations of long-established garment forms with contemporary ones, or new looks with fresh proportions and silhouettes, abound in the African fashion design scene (Rovine 2015).
Elsewhere in the Congo, a unique fashion culture emerged among male youth. A subculture arose based upon dressing well—despite dire economic circumstances—in European designer clothes and accessories. The group is called la Sape. Members of the group, or club, are sapeurs. The name derives from the French verb saper meaning “to dress elegantly” (Friedman 1990: 128) and is an acronym for the longer descriptive name Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes (the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People). The practice of local men dressing in stylish European business clothes is not new; it stretches back at least to the 1910s in colonial Brazzaville where African house servants, office clerks, and popular musicians all wore European menswear styles. Men’s social clubs soon emerged in Brazzaville for dancing, enjoying beverages, and displaying Western men’s fashion (Martin 1994).
How did the fascination with Western fashion happen? France had colonized the region on the north and west side of the Congo River, now comprising the Republic of Congo, where Brazzaville is the capital and the clubs first appeared. The colony of French Congo dates from 1888 to 1960. Belgium colonized the region on the south and east side of the river, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Belgian Congo dates from 1876 to 1960. Directly across the river from Brazzaville in Kinshasa, the neighboring capital, subsequent branches of the club appeared.