The Fabric of Cultures

Fashion, Identity, and Globalization

Eugenia Paulicelli, Hazel Clark, Eugenia Paulicelli, Hazel Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135253554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diseño
• Subtopic: Diseño de moda

Fashion is both public and private, material and symbolic, always caught within the lived experience and providing an incredible tool to study culture and history.

The Fabric of Cultures examines the impact of fashion as a manufacturing industry and as a culture industry that shapes the identities of nations and cities in a cross-cultural perspective, within a global framework. The collected essays investigate local and global economies, cultures and identities and the book offers for the first time, a wide spectrum of case studies which focus on a diversity of geographical spaces and places, from global capitals of fashion such as New York, to countries less known or identifiable for fashion such as contemporary Greece and soviet Russia.

Highly illustrated and including essays from all over the world, The Fabric of Cultures provides a comprehensive survey of the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on fashion, identity and globalisation.

Chapter 1
From potlatch to Wal-Mart

Courtly and capitalist hierarchies through dress

Jane Schneider

Cloth and clothing constitute an illuminating lens through which to consider the history of inequality—that is, social relations of vastly unequal wealth, status, and power. This is especially so if we take into account both the production and the consumption of these fundamentally important exemplars of material culture. An emphasis on consumption alone risks reproducing the simplistic notion that what one wears merely indexes and communicates one’s social position. Conversely, focusing only on production reproduces the triumphalist narrative of capitalist industrialization and marketing, a narrative in which the West dominates “the rest.”

As is well known, productivist understandings of capitalism focus on the mobilization of proletarianized wage labor as the central characteristic. Capitalist accumulation is also closely associated with the “capture” of raw materials through colonial and imperial projects. At the same time, however, these sources of profit are utterly dependent on the special genius of capitalism, which is its ongoing democratization of the possibility of enhancing the self through consuming. Because this democratization presupposes low-cost goods and services, the two aspects—exploitative interventions in production and the cultivation of desire—are integrally related.

Self-enhancement is admittedly a vague idea. Loosely it stands for energizing ourselves and our close others through life-affirming, death-denying, initiatives. Examples involving clothes include transforming our bodies and surroundings in ways we believe are aesthetically or sexually attractive; displaying ourselves to accrue prestige or feel worthy and empowered; generously distributing clothing or accessories to consolidate friendships and followings; signaling through clothes an identification with particular ideas or affiliation with particular groups; and discarding old clothes, perhaps redefined as rags or clutter, in order to make room for more. Clothing consumption is always restless and multidimensional—a mix of these and other elements. The point is that, in modern capitalist societies, its enhancing qualities are, or can be, the purview of virtually everyone.

As a political-economic and cultural system, capitalism historically overlaid and displaced, but did not eliminate, arrangements that privileged elite consumption, in which the opportunities for enhancement were intensely hierarchically distributed. Rather than label these earlier arrangements “pre-capitalist” or “noncapitalist”—appellations that imply, in the first instance, their eventual disappearance and, in the second, an absence or lack—I will (experimentally) refer to them as “courtly,” highlighting their relation to hierarchy. This choice of words challenges several well-worn assumptions: that capitalist and “other” consumption practices are related to each other as the commodity is to the gift; that the modern consumer was newly constituted as a rational individual, exercising choice in the marketplace; and that the debate over whether modern consumer choices are really “free” or manipulated by image and advertising is worth the ink it absorbs. As the explication of the term “enhancement” suggests, modern consumer practices are fully continuous with, and indeed illuminated by, the ethnography on which Marcel Mauss based his brilliant theory of the gift (Mauss 1954 [1923–1924]).

But whereas in the consumption sphere continuities between courtly and capitalist practice are considerable, a deep rupture splits the sphere of production. Unmarked by the proletarianizing and colonizing strategies alluded to above, the courtly production of cloth and clothing hinges on the ability of nobles and chiefs to acquire rare and precious materials through deputized trade and barter, and to frequent, patronize or attach to their courts, in some cases through a form of enslavement, beehives of artisan activity—skilled, knowledgeable, artistically inclined, selflessly dedicated as the case may be. Under such arrangements, manufacturers are in control of product design and decisions and, we surmise, of the organization and rhythm of work. In short, they enjoy a modicum of autonomy that is all but lost in industrialized textile and garment manufacturing.

This chapter examines the self-enhancing qualities of cloth and clothing in the context of courtly societies, identifying both the continuities and the discontinuities with capitalism. It further highlights the artisan production of these goods as contrasted with industrial capitalist manufacture. Two historical moments of exuberant clothing consumption are then compared: the distributions of Chilkat “blankets” at potlatching feasts in the late nineteenth century on the Northwest Coast, and the credit-intensified purchase of logo-branded clothes in late twentieth-century US Wal-Marts. The comparison, it is hoped, validates paying simultaneous attention to production and consumption when asking big questions of cloth and clothing history, specifically what this history reveals about the dynamics of social inequality under capitalism.¹

Enhancement and the spirituality of cloth and clothing

The ethnography and archaeology of Africa, Asia, Melanesia, and Latin America, carried on throughout the twentieth century, is rich with details supporting the notion that cloth and clothing are integral to self and smallgroup enhancement. Two kinds of description stand out: one related to the spirituality of cloth, the other to its aesthetic properties. That objects can have a spiritual dimension was long ago established by Mauss, who theorized that gifts are a fundamentally political phenomenon, staving off sentiments of envy or resentment that might otherwise lead to the evil eye, and even to open warfare. Once given, they compel reciprocity because the spirit of the giver is embodied in them, adding moral weight (Mauss 1954 [1923–24]: 10). Objects often also encode the names, biographies, memories, and histories of past “owners,” deepening the significance of their transmission. In the 1970s and 1980s, Annette B. Weiner applied these ideas specifically to cloth. One of her case studies was Western Samoa, where women traditionally soaked, dried, and plaited the narrow fibers of the pandanus to make large, linen-like mats. Lasting as long as 200 years, these mats absorbed value through association with ancestors and mythical events; reinforcing claims to the past, they were desired, and kept, as treasure. And yet they frayed at the edges—a poignant reminder of the fragility of the human condition (see Weiner 1989; 1992).

Whether the spiritual endowment of cloth and clothing is believed to derive from soaking up historical and mythical associations, from the intrinsic quality of impermanence, or from artisans’ incantations as described below, it is an endowment that ensures their centrality in the multiple exchanges connecting humans with the world of spirits and divinities, and with one another. In episodes of spirit possession, a returning or restless essence is frequently believed to seek not only a human body in which to dwell, but human apparel, and to reveal its identity through demands for specific items of cloth and clothing (e.g. Verger 1954). A transforming medium, cloth also delineates and adorns sacred spaces; bedecks ceremonial dancers; drapes temples, shrines, icons, chiefs, and priests; and enriches umbrellas and palanquins. Mayan brocaded blouses called huipiles clothe images of patron saints and the Virgin Mary, while Andean herders propitiate earth and mountain spirits with a special textile bundle (Morris 1986; Zorn 1985).

Cloth intensifies sociality in rituals of birth, initiation, and curing. As James J. Fox summarized for Indonesia’s outer islands, it “swaddles the newborn, wraps and heals the sick, embraces and unites the bride and groom, encloses the wedding bed, and in the end, enshrouds the dead” (1977: 97). In many societies, spouses provide each other’s wedding attire and minimum future wardrobes, thereby tightening the knot (e.g. Kendall 1985). Textiles that a bride prepares herself—spinning, weaving, embroidering, adding appliqué or lace—constitute her personal gift, her trousseau, to her new household and its eventual descendants.

The capacity of cloth to enhance who we are and deepen our social relationships is especially evident in ethnographies of mortuary rituals, in which the living wrap their dead, whether for burial, reburial, or cremation, in textiles believed to ensure their continuance as social beings. So compelling is the idea that cloth constitutes a continuing tie that often the dead are understood to demand it on pain of sorcery or possession (Darish 1989; Feeley-Harnik 1989). In investiture ceremonies conferring entitlements, cloth also plays a central role. In India, writes Bernard S. Cohn (1989), the Mughal court stored as treasure piles of memory-saturated fabrics, considering them a medium for the transfer of essential substances and an emblem of “honor for posterity.” How appropriate, then, to place such fabrics on the shoulders of a successor. When a new emperor is installed in Japan, textiles crafted by the rustic method of laboriously soaking, rotting, boiling, and beating coarse, uncultivated fibers convey a simultaneously material and spiritual blessing derived from the “most ancient core of Japanese culture” (Cort 1989: 379).

These brief descriptions of cloth and clothing as spiritually enhancing are drawn from the work of ethnographers, historians, and archaeologists of societies we have defined as courtly, who not only conducted their research a few decades ago, but who also considered themselves, at the time, to be documenting “traditional” practices. “Preindustrial” or “noncommercial” clothes and fabrics have a dominant presence in their accounts, as does what most social theory considers to be a “premodern” orientation toward religious phenomena, emphasizing their presence in the material world. It can be argued, however, that the spiritual and the material are inseparable in the minds of humans everywhere, including those who inhabit fully modern industrial–capitalist societies. Here, too, people keep and store items of cloth and clothing for reasons that include the memories encoded in them—for example, the memory of receiving them from a particular relation as a gift. Here, too, the clothes of deceased loved ones elicit intense affect, a feeling of connection. And, a point we return to below, here, too, the idea lives on, despite two centuries of modern scientific discourse, that cloth and clothes enhance the person in magical ways, promoting his or her success as a vital, loved, admired social being.

Enhancement and artisan production

The idea that cloth and clothing are spiritually imbued materials is reinforced by ethnographic descriptions of artisans performing rituals and observing particular taboos in the course of spinning, weaving, embroidering, brocading, dyeing, finishing, and thereby animating their product. Pueblo men spun, wove, and embroidered in their male ritual center, the kiva. Older Kodi women in Sumba, Indonesia, likely practitioners of midwifery and, more covertly, of witchcraft, specialized in the resist-dyeing of warp yarns with earth tones and indigo. Supplying these yarns to younger women for the production of warp-faced ikats on backstrap looms, they let it be known through song, lament, and ritual offerings that dyeing was analogous to childbirth. Imperfectly dyed cloth signified miscarriage, so much so that a pregnant woman should refrain from looking into the dye pots, lest the sight of the dark, churning, and foul-smelling liquid dissolve the contents of her womb (Hoskins 1989).

Beyond contributing spirituality, artisans contribute beauty—an equally critical ingredient in the capacity of cloth and clothing to infuse persons with vitality and widen their social worlds. Nor are these aspects separable; design motifs such as “god’s eyes” and genealogical crests, and symbolically coded colors, are at once beautiful and the conduits of spiritual power. Essential elements in textile aesthetics are the interlacing of warp and weft, “post-loom” decoration (e.g. embroidery, appliqué, reverse appliqué), and the feel and color harmonies of the finished piece. Clothing hinges as well on shape, whether the soft contours of wrapped and folded lengths of fabric or the sculptural architecture that is achieved by tailoring—cutting, fitting, and sewing. Throughout the history of cloth and clothing production, male and female artisans have elaborated on one or more of these variables, inspired by other arts, by the availability of raw materials, by rivalries with other producers, by the support of patrons, and through interaction with one another.

No cloth or clothing tradition was ever static, although many traditions became known to very wide audiences for particular, excellent, or unusual qualities, and are today collected by aficionados and museums—Chilkat (Northwest Coast) dancing capes and leggings among them. Experts appreciate artisans having seized opportunities and overcome obstacles in order to produce a textile worthy of such prestige. The difficulties of obtaining fast colors—yellows, blues, and above all reds—in the centuries before the invention of aniline dyes included this challenge: although protein fibers bond with dyestuffs, cellulose fibers (e.g. linen and cotton) repel them unless treated with special mordants. No wonder that, historically, dyers occupied a particularly auspicious position among cloth makers. The reputations of many renowned textiles, some of them objects of royal monopolies, depended on dyers’ ability and special knowledge (Schneider 1978, 1987: 427–431).

Although we can only guess at the everyday quality of productive relations for the distant past, pockets of oppression surely existed. The most telling instances were based on gender. In some courtly contexts, cloth was manufactured wholly or largely by men. The Lele of Central Africa, studied by Mary Douglas, assigned women to cultivate food, leaving men to weave fine raffia textiles (Douglas 1967). In the characteristic “men’s cloths” of West Africa, men brocaded imported (and colorful) silk or woolen yarn into a cotton ground whose fibers were cultivated, processed, and spun by women. Especially in polygynous households, or where Muslim rules of female seclusion prevailed, this rendered their contribution subordinate. In certain circumstances, however, women developed their own cloth styles, rooted in the resist-dyeing of commercial cloth, and did not spin for men. Similarly, urban-centered Javanese batiking was a women’s craft. Nevertheless, in most historical societies, when men’s and women’s styles coexisted, women more often than men produced their cloth in rural households and villages, men in the towns and cities; men more than women benefited from the opposite gender’s dedication to tasks of minor aesthetic relevance, like processing fibers and spinning.

Forms of enslavement appear in some accounts of artisanal cloth production. As shifting trade patterns opened the door for the Bushong Kuba, neighbors of the Lele, to create their “velvet” elaboration of raffia in what is now southern Zaire, the royal authority imported slaves to tend the plantations of raffia palms and harvest the fiber. They also exercised their marital privileges to bring women to their court, tasking them with adding plushpile designs to male-woven lengths of raffia (Vansina 1978). As with the Inka, the instruction of court-bound women in the textile arts—here the skill was embroidery, with the Inka it was tapestry weaving—must have been controlling. And yet, even under these circumstances, because the artisans in question possessed admired skills and specialized knowledge, they can be presumed to have had the leverage to connect ideas about design, motif, and color with the movements of their own hands. Nor did most cloth artisans work under conditions of near-enslavement. One should not, of course, romanticize their “mode of production”—work could be extremely tedious, foul-smelling and even dangerous; apprentices were demeaned as much as they were encouraged; materials could fail, or fail to be available. The point is that, compared with factory laborers, artisans are a fortunate lot. Garnering the respect of elites who value their talents, they also enjoy relative equality in the workplace, which is minimally dominated, if at all, by overseers and bosses. In short, they benefit in the production sphere from the treasured condition of autonomy—a “gift” that industrial capitalism took away.

Courtly consumption

In contrast, in courtly societies, the consumption sphere is all about hierarchy; the most beautiful “things,” and the most spiritually powerful as well, circulate upward toward the chiefs and royals and aristocrats at the top. Louis Dumont’s labels for Western and (in his terms) “non-Western” ideological systems—Homo equalis and Homo hierarchicus, respectively—aptly capture the courtly-capitalist contrast in this regard (Dumont 1970). Pursuant to the Homo hierarchicus ideology, elites, and particularly male elites, accumulated prestigious cloth and clothing in part to adorn and make splendid themselves and their surroundings, in part to store as treasure, and in part for dispersal in grand distributions aimed at embarrassing rivals and winning loyal followers. In a well-known analysis of cloth and its functions in the Inka state, John Murra, for example, showed that surpluses of peasant cloth, woven with “magical precautions” and mobilized through the Inka tribute system, were piled so high in the royal warehouses as to stagger the Spanish conquerors (Murra 1989 [1962]).

Inka rulers further appropriated cloth from weavers in the state’s administrative centers and at court—source points for exquisitely fine tapestries. Constructed of strong cotton warps acquired through exchanges with the coast, and softer, brightly dyed alpaca wefts obtained from the highlands, these textiles were in great demand for purposes of diplomacy and foreign exchange. Kings offered them as gifts to attract the fealty of lords in newly incorporated peripheries and forbade their wear or display in the absence of royal approval. Especially valued for this overtly political purpose were cloths from the royal wardrobe, steeped with associations of past rulers and deeds. An “initial pump primer of dependence,” suggests Murra (1989 [1962]: 293), cloth of this sort was hoarded by the lords of the provinces for ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From potlatch to Wal-Mart: courtly and capitalist hierarchies through dress
• 2 Dressing the nation: Indian cinema costume and the making of a national fashion, 1947–1957
• 3 Made in America: Paris, New York, and postwar fashion photography
• 4 Framing the Self, staging identity: clothing and Italian style in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni (1950–1964)
• 5 The art of dressing: body, gender, and discourse on fashion in Soviet Russia in the 1950s and 1960s
• 6 Fashioning appropriate youth in 1990s Vietnam
• 7 Youth, gender, and secondhand clothing in Lusaka, Zambia: local and global styles
• 8 Fashion design and technologies in a global context
• 9 Fabricating Greekness: from fustanella to the glossy page
• 10 Fashion Brazil: South American style, culture, and industry
• 11 Fashioning “China style” in the twenty-first century
• 12 From factories to fashion: an intern’s experience of New York as a global fashion capital