Clothing

A Global History

Robert Ross

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745657530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

In virtually all the countries of the world, men, and to a lesser extent women, are today dressed in very similar clothing. This book gives a compelling account and analysis of the process by which this has come about. At the same time it takes seriously those places where, for whatever reason, this process has not occurred, or has been reversed, and provides explanations for these developments.

The first part of this story recounts how the cultural, political and economic power of Europe and, from the later nineteenth century North America, has provided an impetus for the adoption of whatever was at that time standard Western dress. Set against this, Robert Ross shows how the adoption of European style dress, or its rejection, has always been a political act, performed most frequently in order to claim equality with colonial masters, more often a male option, or to stress distinction from them, which women, perhaps under male duress, more frequently did.

The book takes a refreshing global perspective to its subject, with all continents and many countries being discussed. It investigates not merely the symbolic and message-bearing aspects of clothing, but also practical matters of production and, equally importantly, distribution.

1

Introduction

Take the meeting of world leaders known as the G8, which met in Evian, France, in June 2003. It was a gathering which had important discussions to conduct, and important decisions to make. What is intriguing, though, is the fact that as they emerged to have the collective photograph taken, the political leaders of the eight most powerful countries in the world – though the Chinese were not there – all of whom were men, all wore basically the same outfit – dark suit, light shirt, tie, polished shoes. The Presidents of Russia, France and the United States of America, the Prime Ministers of Japan, Italy, Great Britain and Canada and the Chancellor of Germany had all adopted this uniform. So had the leaders of lesser nations who were allowed to put their case to the mighty, with two exceptions, the President of Nigeria and the representative of Saudi Arabia. Prince Abdullah Ibn Abdul Aziz Al Saud was in flowing Bedouin robes, Olusegun Obasanjo was in equally flowing Yoruba costume. But the South African, Thabo Mbeki, wore a suit as well-tailored as that of any of his confreres, as did the presidents of India, Malaysia and China.

1 World leaders in Evian, 2003

It is instructive, as a thought experiment, to wonder what a gathering of their predecessors four hundred years ago would have looked like. If it had been possible to gather the Kings of France and Spain, the Ottoman Sultan, the Shah of Persia, the Mughal Emperor, the Emperor of China, the Shogun of Japan and whoever might be given the eighth place, perhaps already the Stadhouder of the Netherlands, then there would have been no uniformity in their dress, even though, as in 2003, they were all men. Representatives from lesser powers, say the Alafin of Oyo, the Mwene Mutapa, leaders of the Iroquois confederacy, any remaining Inca notables, would only have added to the sartorial diversity on show. Moreover, none would be dressed as their successors now are.

Or take Hluhluwe, a small country town in northern Zululand, in a poor area of South Africa, living off sisal, pineapples, timber and rhinoceroses (via tourists), on a cold winter’s weekday in 2003. It could have been anywhere, except that I happened to be sitting outside the supermarket for half an hour or so. The men there were dressed in cotton trousers – occasionally jeans – shirts and jackets, often of leather. The women generally wore skirts reaching halfway between the knee and the ankle, though a few wore cotton trousers. For the rest, most wore jerseys and woollen jackets, although a very few had blankets round their shoulders, generally to carry a baby. Both men and women wore socks and mass-produced shoes, often sports shoes. A number of men wore woollen hats – it was June, after all – and the women generally had some sort of headscarf or other covering on their heads. The few boys who were not at school, probably because they had no one to pay for their fees and school uniforms, wore knee length trousers and shirts. I saw no girls hanging around there.

The sight was, somehow, South African in its details, in the way the headscarves were tied, in the woolly hats, in the length of the skirts, but even in this politically most ethnic, most Zulu, of areas, there was no one who wore anything which was in any way obviously ethnic, except perhaps for the rather too fat man who had on short shorts and sandals as only a white South African can, and two dancers in Zulu warrior gear who were attracting tourists by the game reserve. For the rest, the people of Hluhluwe had long been accustomed to dressing in a casual version of Western clothing. And no doubt, if they could afford it, the men would wear suits and ties to church on Sundays, and to other important events, and the women smart dresses.

This scene, simple enough, could be replicated in tens of thousands of shopping centres across the globe. There are of course all sorts of minor variations, and often quite substantial ones. In general, I would imagine, the women are more likely to diverge from the standard western norm than are the men.

These two vignettes from the early twenty-first century raise a question that is profoundly historical. How has this cultural homogenization come about? How has it come to be that when the President of France and the Prime Minister of Japan meet they are wearing essentially the same clothes, while their predecessors, say Henri IV and the Shogun Tokugawa leyasu, would not have been? What process has resulted in the people of Hluhluwe wearing clothes that are basically the same as those worn by men and women in Leiden, the Netherlands; in Salta, Argentina; in Bangkok; in Charleston, South Carolina; and indeed in most towns in most countries in the world? Just as importantly, why was it was the President of Nigeria and the first minister of Saudi Arabia who held out against the trend, if that is what they were doing? Where, and why, do large proportions of the population not wear variations of the common mode? Why are bodies covered, almost everywhere? Even in winter, there would have been much more bare flesh in Hluhluwe a century and a half ago. Is it true that women are more constrained by “tradition” than men, and if so how has that come about? Is it true, as Ali Mazrui commented thirty-five years or more ago, that “the most successful cultural bequest from the West to the rest of the world has been precisely Western dress”? He continued: “Mankind is getting rapidly homogenised by the sheer acquisition of the Western shirt and the Western trousers. The Japanese businessman, the Arab Minister, the Indian lawyer, the African civil servant have all found a common denominator in the Western suit.”¹ It is to these sorts of question that I hope to give some answers in the course of this book.²

These answers can obviously be subsumed under the term “globalization”, itself a consequence of North American and European technical prowess, economic growth, imperialism and sense of cultural superiority.³ For all its potential modishness, this term does refer to a phenomenon which is real and important. Among many other things, notably in the speed of information movement around the globe, the material culture of the world has become (partially) homogenized. But to demonstrate this obviously requires a global approach, one in which the courts of King Chulalongkorn of Siam and the Meiji Emperor are as central as that of the King-Emperor Edward VII, in which, if it is necessary to find individuals, the most important are perhaps Kemal Atatürk, the Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, not Christian Dior, and in which the Herero long dress is as important as the New Look, probably more so because it has lasted much longer.

It should be obvious that I have not approached the writing of this book as a professional student of clothing, nor even more of the history of cloth. I was amused to discover Max Beerbohm’s comment on Thomas Carlyle, who wrote one of the first treatises on clothing, to the effect that “anyone who dressed so very badly as did Thomas Carlyle should have tried to construct a philosophy of clothing has always seemed to me one of the most pathetic things in literature.”⁴ In stereotypical gendered behaviour, it was my sisters, not me, who, when we were young, would regularly visit the costume galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and I cannot remember having done so until I was well on the way to completing this book.⁵ Rather I am an African historian, and have taken pleasure from the idea that the continent will no longer be seen as a site of naked savagery. Specifically, I have long worked on colonial South Africa, and in that context I have written about the ways in which aspects of European culture were adopted, and put to their own uses, by the colonized. In this sense, I hope, this book is an extension of that work. If so, it must depart from the assumption that what people wear, like what they believe, can only in part be imposed from above, or outside. Rather, in the long term, the rules for external covering have to be internalized. This book is about how that has happened.

It should be clear that this approach is not the usual one in the history of clothing and dress. While I am in this a “lumper”, generally those concerned with dress and clothing are what would be termed “splitters”, if we were engaged in the study of natural, rather than social, history.⁶ In other words they emphasize the differences between the various costumes which they study, just as some taxonomists are more likely than others to see the organisms they study as belonging to different species. The reasons for this lie both in the most common reaction of almost anyone, at least in my experience, towards clothing and dress, which is to look for and to stress the particular, and also in the history of the discipline of dress history. On the one hand, the history of textiles has tended, naturally and rightly enough, to be about questions of production and, to some extent, distribution, in other words on the classic subjects of economic history, most notably of course with regard to the origins of the Industrial Revolution but also much more widely. On the other, dress history as such had its origins first in antiquarianism, both temporal and spatial, and then within the broader field of art history. Initially, the study of apparel was one of the ways by which art historians attempted to date, and perhaps to place, paintings.⁷ The finer the distinctions which could be made between what was being worn in a given year, and the next, and between the costume of one town, and the next, the better this task could be accomplished. As the discipline began to claim a higher status and to establish itself, this was primarily on the basis of work with collections, and on the basis of research into objects. There are of course dangers in such work. In general only the clothes from a tiny minority of the population, primarily from the highest strata, and in the relatively recent past, have survived. Moreover there are on occasion reasons why, even within this selection, certain sorts of clothes are overrepresented (for instance, silk, unlike wool, cotton or linen, cannot be recycled, and therefore garments made of such material are much more likely to have survived). I have the highest regard for the professionalism of such practitioners, who possess skills to which I cannot aspire. It should, however, be evident that their investigations into individual objects – their dating, provenance, manufacture and so forth – must lead to a concentration on the particular, and an avoidance of discussions of long-term similarities. In addition, many such scholars have been trained in schools of fashion, or are in other ways associated with them. The result can be an emphasis on the ephemeral, which fashion, important though it is and has been (as I hope this book will emphasize), of necessity is.

On the other hand, the drive towards the study of dress in general, and indeed dress history in particular, has been fed by ethnographic and anthropological enquiries. At their best, these are concerned with the structures of meaning which are given to dress codes. Thus one of the first, and probably still one of the most innovative, works in this genre, by Petr Bogatyrev on folk costume in Moravian Slovakia, took its inspiration from structural linguistics. However, in order to lay bare the structures in question it was necessary again to stress the differences between the dress worn by individuals of specific statuses – how the headgear of married women differed from that of the unmarried, and how the shame of unmarried mothers was marked sartorially, so that they married in other dress than putatively virgin brides, and so forth.⁸ Even without the structuralist arguments within which Bogatyrev was working, most ethnographic work on costume was long either in some sense ethno-nationalist or effectively “othering” its subjects. It was rare for the student of ethnographic material culture, in which dress should be included, to follow the admonition – admittedly made only in 1996 – of Claude Lévi-Strauss that “if we really wanted to display the ethnography of New Guinea, we should display a Toyota alongside the masks”.⁹

In one respect I am attempting to follow the conventional definitions.¹⁰ In these, distinction is made between, on the one hand, “dress”, which refers to the complete look, thus including for instance hair styling, tattooing and cosmetic scarification as well as items of apparel, and, on the other, “clothing”, which refers to the items of apparel, generally but by no means always made of some form of textile, leather and so forth. Further, “costume” is used sparingly, and to refer to dress which is donned in order to demonstrate, unambiguously, a specific identity. Finally, there is “fashion”, which of course is not specifically related to dress, but which refers to those things, material or otherwise, which at any given moment are, according to the Oxford English Dictionary the “conventional usage in dress, mode of life, etc., especially as observed in the upper circles of society”. This is a definition which only holds good if the “upper circles of society” are taken very widely, to include, for instance, pop singers just as much as – currently much more than – duchesses. Who sets the fashion can change as quickly as the fashion itself, but the whole point of fashion is that it changes fast, and works to include and to exclude those who do, or do not, adhere to its dictates.

What is clothing for? The Germans describe the uses of clothing as Schutz, Scham and Schmuck – protection, modesty and ornament. These are all relative, even the need for protection against the elements. The inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, which would seem to be one of the harshest climates in which humans have lived, were usually close to naked, and presumably coped with their need for warmth without clothing. Of course, it is in general much better to be scantily dressed when wet, as the cooling effects of water are exaggerated by soaked clothes. As for the rest, modesty is close to a human universal, and the end of innocence was signified, not only in the Book of Genesis, by the putting on of clothes. What constitutes modest dress, however, could vary from the leather cap covering the glans of the penis, with which a Zulu gentleman, in the past, was decently dressed, to the full body veil, the burqa, of Afghan women. There are equally those who, at a given moment, may wish to flaunt their bodies, rather than conceal them. And as for ornament, the malleability of fashion over the centuries has been extreme. Universals of male and female beauty simply do not exist, nor are there ways to predict what will be seen as enhancing that beauty.¹¹

Though clothing then protects our bodies against the elements and against the unwanted gaze of our fellows and attracts the wanted gaze, it nevertheless does more. It is one of the ways in which we make statements. It forms a language, if a restricted one. There are relatively few things that can be “said” through clothes, but they are very important things. Essentially, people use clothes to make two basic statements: first, this is the sort of person I am; and secondly, this is what I am doing. Such claims, for that is what they are, need not necessarily be true – a sign has after all been defined as something through which it is possible to lie¹² – and often include a considerable degree of wishful thinking. They may also be forced upon the wearer of the clothes by some other people, as in the case of those slaves who were not allowed to wear shoes or a hat or, in parts of the Arabian peninsula, a full facial veil, and the choices are almost always constrained by economics. Furthermore, like every language, verbal or otherwise, clothing at any given time and place has a grammar, usually constructed out of a set of oppositions, and can always be analysed as a semiotic system.¹³ This requires, though, that clothing systems be treated, for the purposes of analysis, as static, while in fact, like the grammars of all living languages, they are in continual flux. Indeed sartorial grammars are likely to change faster than those of many other sorts of language because one of the things that people often want to make clear through their clothing is that they are up to date and in fashion.

They are also languages which have to be learnt, either as a child or as a (young) adult. This may lead to a situation of bilingualism, and potentially interesting moments of “code-switching”, or to the fairly complete replacement of the one code by another. There are two points which need to be made on this: first, individuals can make clear statements by wearing clothes from one sartorial idiom in circumstances which would really call for another; and, secondly, like all those who learn a language, they can make mistakes, which may lead to embarrassment. This may, of course, be a consequence of the fact that dress codes, indeed like verbal and all other codes, are not necessarily constant across all sections of even a “monolingual” society. There are, in other words, usu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Illustrations
• Picture Credits
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Rules of Dress
• 3 Redressing the Old World
• 4 First Colonialisms
• 5 The Production, Care and Distribution of Clothing
• 6 The Export of Europe
• 7 Reclothed in Rightful Minds: Christian Missions and Clothing
• 8 Re-forming the Body; Reforming the Mind
• 9 The Clothing of Colonial Nationalism
• 10 The Emancipation of Dress
• 11 Engendered Acceptance and Rejection
• 12 Conclusion
• Index