Dressing Global Bodies

The Political Power of Dress in World History

Beverly Lemire, Giorgio Riello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351028721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Dressing Global Bodies addresses the complex politics of dress and fashion from a global perspective spanning four centuries, tying the early global to more contemporary times, to reveal clothing practice as a key cultural phenomenon and mechanism of defining one's identity.

This collection of essays explores how garments reflect the hierarchies of value, collective and personal inclinations, religious norms and conversions. Apparel is now recognized for its seminal role in global, colonial and post-colonial engagements and for its role in personal and collective expression. Patterns of exchange and commerce are discussed by contributing authors to analyse powerful and diverse colonial and postcolonial practices. This volume rejects assumptions surrounding a purportedly all-powerful Western metropolitan fashion system and instead aims to emphasize how diverse populations seized agency through the fashioning of dress.

Dressing Global Bodies contributes to a growing scholarship considering gender and race, place and politics through the close critical analysis of dress and fashion; it is an indispensable volume for students of history and especially those interested in fashion, textiles, material culture and the body across a wide time frame.

1

The fabric of early globalization

Skin, fur and cloth in the de Bry’s travel accounts, 1590–1630

Susanna Burghartz

‘The island of Virginia in the region of America was discovered in 1587; because of the variety of its dress and customs, I thought I should put it into this book.’¹ This is how Cesare Vecellio explained the addition of Virginia to the 1598 second edition of his extraordinarily successful costume book, which appeared under the title Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo. As the first costume book with an ambition for global coverage, it included the continent of America.² Beginning with a detailed description of dress in his native city, Venice, in the first edition of his book published in 1590, Vecellio provided not only a proto-ethnographic overview of Italy and Europe but also of Asia and Africa based on regionally differing clothing styles. In 1598 he added the so-called New World at the end of his encyclopaedic work.³ The section on Virginia was based on images and information published for the first time just eight years earlier in the first volume of Theodor de Bry’s America series. The Calvinist de Bry launched his successful and long-lasting publishing venture in 1590 with a volume dedicated to European voyages to the West, so-called Indiae occidentalis or Americae. His sons expanded it from 1597 onwards with voyages to the East, so-called Indiae orientalis, thus making this richly illustrated travel collection an undertaking of truly global proportions.⁴ The two series were published in Frankfurt and appeared in both German and Latin.⁵ As a whole they were aimed at scholars and collectors, courts and the wealthy urban elites in Germany and Europe. The engravings in both series became the most extensive and influential pictorial archive of the first globalization.⁶

The connections between the genres of the costume book and the travel collection were no coincidence. Both aimed at cataloguing and categorizing the world. In the course of the sixteenth century, European costume books had developed visual strategies for depicting the grammar of social and regional differences within and between societies through clothing.⁷ At the same time, travel accounts, cosmologies and choreographies developed processes for integrating the New World more or less coherently into existing European knowledge systems and revising them in accordance with a stage theory of civilized development.⁸

Taking the example of the de Brys’ lavishly illustrated travel collection, this chapter discusses the meaning of clothing and its effects on the formation of identities in what has been called the first age of globalization. The focus will be on imagination as well as knowledge and economics, since around 1600 Europeans like Vecellio were not simply honing a global system of classification based on dress. Europeans were also becoming integrated into an increasingly global system of exchange that included large-scale trade of textiles from Asia to Europe and from Europe to Africa and the Americas. Yet, the economic interest in global exchange and trade could not always be smoothly reconciled with striving to organize the world through clothing according to a system that demonstrated the superiority of European civilization. Europeans employed sometimes surprising narrative and visual strategies involving similarity, otherness and adaptation in order to sketch a reassuring picture of their own superiority. Their aim was to link their own well-established clothing system that organized differences of sex, status and ethnicity with their economic hopes and interests.

In recent years, global history has intensely discussed the role of fashion and fabric for an early age of globalization, c.1400–1800.⁹ It has become increasingly clear how important not just actual interactions and opportunities for exchange were, but also their imaginary anticipation, configuration and mastery. Economically, the trade in fabrics and the (raw) materials to produce them grew steadily. Gold and silver, spices and crops were not the only driving forces behind global networking processes. The significance of non-European raw materials, fabrics, skins and furs in the European textile regions and their global interactions also grew apace. They permanently changed early modern consumer cultures and led to the advent of a new ‘cosmopolitan material culture’.¹⁰ At the same time, fabrics and clothing also played a key identity-political role for European textile cultures, whose prosperity and long-standing artisanal pride was largely based on the production of and trade in fabrics. By developing a global system of knowledge and classification for clothing with the aid of costume books, cosmologies and travelogues, they could create a more or less coherent context linking their own notions of social order with the positioning of various non-European societies and even those deemed ‘savage’ on a scale of civilization. Published between 1590 and 1630, the de Bry family’s Eastern and Western Voyages were among the most famous early modern collections of travel accounts and arguably the most beautifully illustrated. They accompanied the entry of England and the Netherlands as colonial competitors. Moreover, they may be read as globally orientated costume books: they processed knowledge from various sources about dress as a globally functioning system of meaning, thereby illustrating developments over the sixteenth century in the global trade in relevant materials – raw materials like dyewoods, wool, silk, furs, skins and feathers but also various fabrics.

The de Brys deployed a range of existing images. Sometimes they simply copied, sometimes they modified their models, and sometimes they used their own imaginations to affirm, and occasionally alter, European stereotypes about non-European societies and their clothing through images. By portraying clothing from all over the world, the de Brys used texture as a major clue for addressing questions of difference and similarity as well as the vast continuum between these poles. Like contemporary costume books,¹¹ the de Brys used clothing and its opposite, nakedness, to integrate the various peoples and regions visually into a global stage set of historical development. Their illustrated travelogues opened up a wide range of positions between ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ as encoded in dress. But they also reported on the intensive exchange of stuffs and garments between cultures, whether as diplomatic gifts, important commodities or valued means of barter.

Ernst van den Boogaart noted in 2004 that in de Bry, dress ‘provides elementary information about the civility of a social group following the rough-and-ready formula “the more dress the more civility, the more nudity the more savagery”’.¹² I take this formula as a point of departure in order to consider the interplay between unambiguous black and white positioning and the artful transgression of this binary logic. In this chapter I ask how skin, fur and fabric were used on a global comparative scale to negotiate similarity, difference and assimilation: how did the engravings use textures, patterns and cuts to dramatize similarities and differences and to cement but also to play with them? What global topography do the two major de Bry travel series create based on clothing and what systems of circulation and exchange do they invoke? And can we understand the clothing discourse of the costume books and collections of travelogues simultaneously as constitutive elements of a theatre of the global and an emerging stage of early globalization in the making?

(Social) skin – pelts – fur

The first volume on Virginia, for which the de Brys relied on drawings by John White, who documented conditions in Roanoke for the Virginia Company, already appears to affirm the formula of the naked savage. The accompanying engraving depicts Indigenous warriors wearing feathers on their heads and animal-skin loincloths (Figure 1.1). The figures’ nakedness and the descriptive insistence on their primitive, animalistic loincloths at first seem to underline the uncivilized nature of the inhabitants of Virginia. According to the caption, ‘They hange before them the skinne of some beaste verye feinelye dresset in suche sorte, that the tayle hangeth downe behynde’. The text also describes in detail hairstyles, body painting or tattoos.¹³ In combination with the images’ use of poses and gestures the collection thus refers to a general European image of the primitiveness and wildness of the natives. The particular interest in the nakedness of the ‘savages’ displayed by de Bry’s sons also fits this image.¹⁴ As Michiel van Groesen shows in his comprehensive analysis of the collection, the de Brys’ engravers emphasized the natives’ Otherness with a few specific changes to the original drawings by White. By attributing feather headdresses to quite diverse ethnic groups in America, Asia and Africa, they additionally underlined the homogeneity of the uncivilized Other.¹⁵

FIGURE 1.1 ‘A Weroan or Great Lorde of Virginia’, plate 3 from Theodor de Bry, America. Part 1 in English. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, of the Commodities and of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction: dressing global bodies
• 1. The fabric of early globalization: skin, fur and cloth in the de Bry’s travel accounts, 1590–1630
• 2. Fashion in the four parts of the world: time, space and early modern global change
• 3. Shirts and snowshoes: imperial agendas and Indigenous agency in globalizing North America, c.1660–1800
• 4. Dressing enslaved Africans in colonial Louisiana
• 5. Garments in circulation: the economies of slave clothing in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony
• 6. Clothing as a map to Senegambia’s global exchanges at the turn of the nineteenth century
• 7. The king’s new clothing: re-dressing the body politic in Madagascar, c.1815–1861
• 8. Dressing settlers in New Zealand: global interconnections
• 9. ‘Anything for mere show would be worse than useless’: emigration, dress and the Australian colonies, 1820–1860
• 10. Dressing apart: Indian elites and the politics of fashion in British India, c.1750–1850
• 11. Visual assimilation and bodily regimes: Protestant programmes and Anishinaabe everyday dress in North America, 1830s–1950s
• 12. Tailoring in China and Japan: cultural transfer and cutting techniques in the early twentieth century
• 13. Global fashion encounters and Africa: affective materialities in Zambia
• Index