Fashion History

by Linda Welters,Abby Lillethun

  10

  CONCLUSION

  Fashion: global but Western. A complex, ambiguous, and not just a little bit murky relationship exists between Western fashion and other clothing systems, especially non-Western, found throughout the world.

  SANDRA NIESSEN

  Sandra Niessen penned these words in Re-Orienting Fashion addressing “troublesome boundaries” set by fashion theory in relationship to its subject (2003: 243). Much has happened in the period since Re-Orienting Fashion was published. Fashion studies has fully embraced the global, yet Niessen finds that the field still tends “to be Eurocentric, evolutionary, Orientalist, and in urgent need of review and revision” (Niessen 2016: 209). She asks, “Why is the Western bias so deeply entrenched in fashion studies?” pointing to the unchanging course of the field even in the face of “well-formulated and exceptionally serious charges.” The same is true of fashion history; the fashion systems that operated historically in geographical regions beyond Euro-America remain neglected. The same drive for novelty and change related to appearance within societies is little recognized and therefore not integrated into our fundamental understanding of fashion.

  In this book, we have laid out an argument for a global fashion history. The argument is presented in two parts. In Part 1, we first reviewed scholarship in the field of fashion history. After discussing the various interpretations surrounding fashion’s lexicon, we examined key theories that attempt to explain how fashion systems operate. Following that foundation, we surveyed the historiography of fashion history literature, beginning with the earliest sixteenth-century costume history books that indicated curiosity about dress practices in lands beyond Europe. We summarized developments in subsequent centuries that led to the belief that fashion is exclusive to the West and that it appeared there first in the mid-fourteenth century. We offered reasons explaining how the field of fashion history arrived at the current juncture through a review of major developments in scholarship, including the rise of cultural studies. We explained the reasons behind our argument that fashion existed in Europe prior to the medieval period and in cultures outside the West.

  In Part 2, we presented a range of examples across time and space to support our argument. Through these examples, we elucidated the importance of changing tastes in fabrics, hairstyles, and cosmetics—elements sometimes forgotten in fashion history. The notions of hybridity, creolization, and bricolage raise questions about the dominant theories of fashion adoption such as those that consider a capitalist society necessary to have fashion. We have synthesized research in which the behavior we call fashion was present. We presented the work of interdisciplinary scholars who study dress of non-Western cultures as fashion, for example, Jennifer Ball, who researched Byzantine fashion, (2005) and Barbara Voss, who extrapolated data about fashion from archaeological finds in Spanish Colonial America (2008). The work of scholars like these indicates that the field is at a turning point and that the time is right to reconceptualize fashion as a phenomenon that occurred historically around the world. For, as Jennifer Craik states, the fashion impulse is a human impulse. Craik’s observation echoes psychologist J. C. Flügel, who identified decoration as the primary reason that people wear clothes in The Psychology of Clothes (1930).

  We presented examples of rare evidence that humans utilized beads as body embellishments in prehistoric times. These examples featured the earliest artifacts in the form of shell beads from North Africa dated to approximately 110,000 years ago and a more recent site in France from the late Mesolithic Era. Such beads are interpreted to indicate symbolic behavior. We included mastodon tusk beads numbering over 13,000 found at Sungir, Russia, dated to approximately 32,050–28,550 BCE that apparently decorated garments. We presented prehistoric body markings in a general discussion of early known tattoos.

  Several examples of fashion systems in ancient times involved trade routes that resulted in innovations in garments and new materials. When cultures intersected in the exchange of goods, the transfer of ideas also occurred. The discussion of coats, for example, drew on the Silk Road routes that traversed the Asian continent. The style of coats first seen on the Asian steppes developed across time in the oases on the Taklamakan Desert. We interpret these transformations as signs of fashion and as indications that change in style involved a shift in collective taste. Changes in jewelry worn in Bronze Age Greece also demonstrate style change; trade in stones such as beads of lapis lazuli and ostrich shell allowed the fashionable woman in Thebes to be up-to-date in her jewelry. More recent trade patterns that intersected with the Age of Exploration and colonization revealed the fashion preferences of New England’s native peoples, textile fashions in West Africa, and the fashion systems in Latin America from Contact Period to the eighteenth century.

  Examples of fashion change in places normally excluded from the fashion discourse such as China, Korea, Japan, and Indonesia in the East and in the Americas before European colonization demonstrate why their dress should be interpreted as fashion. Likewise, India, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire illustrate cases where the fashion was in the fabric rather than the cut of the garment. Additionally, Europeans in rural areas and enslaved people within Euro-America possess the changing taste along with the desire to embellish the body that characterizes fashion.

  A dominant theory in Western fashion history, the trickle-down theory, explains fashion change as emulation of elites. The elite classes formulated sumptuary restrictions to preserve their position in society. The case studies in this book demonstrate that emulation of elites is not restricted to the West; in fact, it is a common theme across fashion history.

  Some may argue that the examples discussed in this book are not fashion because of the long spans of time needed for change to occur in places such as colonial Peru, where indigenous peoples were subjected to sumptuary laws, or ancient Rome, which has always been considered a prefashion era. The measurement of time is a flexible concept, however, and the desire for novelty existed across time and space. Yet a slower arc of change than in Western capitalistic societies should not be a hindrance for conceptualizing change in styles in both premedieval and non-Western dress as fashion. Given that humans inherently possess the desire to decorate themselves and that evidence of fashion change has been demonstrated in the case studies and examples in this book, as well as by scholars elsewhere, it is time to stop limiting ourselves to the West after the mid-fourteenth century in the telling of fashion’s history.

  The increase in published research relevant to the globalization of fashion history is heartening. We think that many more examples are out there waiting for scholars to discover them through pictorial, material, and documentary evidence. The challenges in pursuing those examples include language barriers and access to publications and museum catalogs in distant places.

  We finish with a call to scholars around the globe to assess new evidence and reinterpret already available evidence, including artifacts in museums, toward writing new fashion histories in light of the reconceptualizatio n of concepts presented here. Scholars must overcome disciplinary boundaries by collaborating with colleagues. To amplify the fashion history knowledge base with exemplars beyond the West, dress history scholars should learn the language of their targeted society and work with others to reach the depth needed. Each study, no matter how small, will contribute to a truly global history of fashion.

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