Fashion and Orientalism

Dress, Textiles and Culture from the 17th to the 21st Century

Adam Geczy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857854278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Orientalism is a central factor within the fashion system, both subtle and overt. In this groundbreaking book, the author shows the extent of the influence that the Orient had, and continues to have, on fashion. Our concept of Western fashion is unthinkable without it, whether in terms of the growth of the cotton industry or of garments we take for granted, such as the dressing gown. From pre-modern to contemporary times, this book demonstrates that, in the realms of fashion, the Orient is not simply a construction or a fascination of the imperial West with its eastern other. Rather, it reveals the extent of cross-pollination, exchange and multiple translation that has taken place between East and West for the last 500 years. Exploring topics including Chinoiserie, masquerade, bohemianism, Japonisme, the "de-Orientalization" of the Orient, perfume and the birth of couture, Fashion and Orientalism is an essential read for students and scholars of fashion, cultural studies and history.

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Early Orientalism and the Barbaresque

And say, besides,—that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and turban’d Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state

—Shakespeare, Othello (V: 2)

Hee had a faire companion of his way,

A goodly Lady clad in scarlet red,

Purfled with gold and pearle of rich assay;

And like a Persian mitre on her hed

Shee wore, with crowns and owches garnished,

The which he lavish lovers gave.

—Spenser, The Faerie Queene (2: XIII)

The notion of a pre- or early orientalism derives from the presumption, held by the majority of orientalist scholars, that orientalism begins with a deliberate, qualitative and self-conscious separation between cultures. This begins to take shape with the age of exploration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is well and truly in place by the eighteenth century with Enlightenment ideals of self-determination and national identity. Nourished by free thinkers like Rousseau and Herder, individuals came to believe that they were bound by more than defensiveness to states or by fealty to a local liege, but rather were bound by a series of identifiers of place and belonging with those around them. To share beliefs and a common history with others was therefore more than incidental; it had to do with a shared nature and a common destiny. The Orient is the unspecific frontier to this consciousness, the region beyond the neighbourly realm, where people and their ways are, in a characteristically unqualified fashion, very, very different. The transformations of attitude that amounted to the orient–occident divide are coterminous with industrial and imperial growth as well as with the development of the idea of comfort and luxury, conditions from which oriental fabrics and styles are never far away.

To this web of relationships we must also add the rise of taxonomic science in the more sharply defined natural sciences of anthropology and entomology. With the discovery of new materials and food types came the discovery of new races, with different facial characteristics and unfamiliar customs. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Orient becomes more than anecdotal discovery and an ever-greater accumulation of facts, albeit facts that are ordered according to a Western credo. Moreover, the age of science was also the age of imperial claim. From the late-sixteenth century, the empirical to the hyperbolic to the apocryphal arrived on domestic shores with a rapidity that, by the eighteenth century, could not meet with demand. Here the basic association of human desire for danger with excitement becomes woven into the very semantics of orientalism, lovingly preserved to this day. Finally, it is only in the eighteenth century that fashion emerges as something resembling a rounded concept that resembles today’s fashion system. To be sure, the Orient enjoyed currency as a term well before this, and there had always been talk of what was fashionable or not. Hand in glove with the quickly burgeoning principles of individual agency and social mobility—the latter an essential condition under which fashion ‘thrives’, according to Entwistle¹—arose a whole new consciousness of competition and image. With this, dress codes were perforce more manipulable, deceptive and persuasive, as opposed to the coercive sumptuary protocols of the seventeenth century. To be seen became an integral part of social intercourse; the sombre austerity of Spanish fashion was abandoned for newly available motley silks and chintzes of oriental flavour.² Through the daily circulation of information generated out of newspapers and their earlier incarnation, the affiches, through bona fide journals devoted to fashion, such as the popular Galerie des modes, through industrial mass-production and the idea of modern commerce fuelled by the middle classes, we can identify a language of difference, advantage, prestige and novelty. It is then that we might begin to speak of ‘orientalist fashion’ as such. This chapter briefly surveys the vast prelude to this period. It maps out salient lines of influence and makes special note of the ways in which Europe and its trading partners, from China to India and the Ottoman Empire, made reciprocal use of one another, in a tangle of adaptation and influence.

The conquests of Alexander the Great (334–335 BC) expanded the possibilities for trade. East and West were not yet divided but mutually reliant concepts, and cultural fascination was less important than military and economic opportunities. Ancient Greece, which is commonly the divider between the Orient and the West, was in fact deeply indebted to the clothing of the empires of Bactria and Gandhara, in which we see an early version of the dhoti, a loincloth known as the paridhana. This was commonly covered by a free-flowing expanse of cloth, like a shawl (uttariya) or a cloak (chadar). From the region that is now India, spreading to Greece and Albania, both sexes would typically wear a large piece of cloth bound around the hips and optionally brought under the legs to resemble pants, much in the manner of a sarong. Usually very long, it could also be slung over the torso, as it is still done in India to this day. Around the same period, in 325 BC, the Gauls were wearing something akin to breeches, pants with an opening in the front and bound at or above the ankle, which they referred to as a paison, a relative of Persian trousers. In this period the Gauls also acquired knowledge of felting, probably from their distant Asian neighbours.

As we know, Byzantine costume, like its culture, was a meeting point of numerous influences. The basic line of court costume was classical, but it was Eastern in its chromatic brilliance. Emperor Justinian himself is known to have worn a combination that brought together the Roman toga with a trabea, a scarf crossed at the chest, and a paragaudion, a Persian tunic with sleeves embroidered with gold. His belt was dyed the royal purple. When Europe began to be invaded in around the fourth century, Byzantium was a crucial point of trade for unusual and luxury items. Traders from all over Europe travelled there to obtain wares from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. It was indeed thanks to Byzantine trade that Alexandrian and Syrian merchants set up offices in ports north and south of the Mediterranean, thus enabling the easier dissemination of Eastern garments and textiles. Byzantium took liberally from the Huns, as they did the Persians, who themselves had taken from the Assyrians and Medeans. It was Justinian who was responsible for the first known sumptuary laws in textiles, because of his apprehensiveness that too much of his realm’s available money went into buying Persian textiles, while the Persians had nothing like the same demand for anything the Byzantines were producing. As a measure to stem the flow, or to choke it, in 540 he proclaimed a ceiling on the prices to be paid for silk, which caused the Persians to retreat en masse in protest. As is often recounted, his courtiers were forced to chafe with coarser underclothes made of linen or wool. The trade block created from Justinian’s proscription eventuated in silkworms being smuggled into Byzantium by a group of missionary monks in 552. But neither the price ceiling nor the import of silkworms broke the monopoly; the oriental textile industry and trade continued to flourish, including from Egypt, Chaldea and further east.

LUXURY TEXTILES AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE SILK TRADE

Just to what extent Justinian was instrumental in the demystification of silk within Europe is debatable, because the fibres of the highest quality still emanated from elsewhere: the Middle East and Cathay. Silks had always been the commodity of choice for the Roman citizenry and aristocracy. Although the earliest dates of trade with Asia and the Middle East are uncertain, they can be traced to as far back as the fourth century BC, when the commerce was predominately with India and Persia. China became part of the arteries of trade when the silk roads became established by the first century AD.

Before the crusades, luxury textiles had already made their entry into the West, mostly brought by pilgrims. But they were still rarities, confined to the wealthy. The enormous amount of travel occasioned by the crusades from the twelfth century onwards made the refinements of Eastern dress more the norm. For instance, Western invaders increasingly wore the tunic, which began to appear in Syria in the second century and which had gained popularity amongst Christians as liturgical vestments. The crusaders were known to have worn tunics with wide sleeves of Arab origin which could be decorated with beads or golden braiding. Luxurious goods included pelisses lined with ermine (known as ‘skin of Babylon’), dark marten, squirrel or white fox that was indigenous to the area around the Caspian Sea.

During this time, these fashions were known as barbarian, or barbaresque, a word equivalent to the modern epithet ‘orientalism’ and just as generic. Strikingly akin to the subsequent application of oriental, ‘barbarian’ referred to anyone of different language and custom. Apprehensions over unfamiliarity made it slide into the pejorative modern usage, usually in opposition to ‘Christian’. In describing an Armenian beauty, Nerval comments that her ‘clothes, less richly barbarian, recalled rather the contemporary fashions of Constantinople’, an unspecified, but by implication a more couth, Christianized form of Eastern dress.³ While barbarism now refers to uncivilized coarseness, in the realms of dress it was first applied to the defiance of austerity in favour of the novel and the new. The women of the Franks were fond of all manner of barbaresque influence and wore sleeves with a still more exaggerated taper than their male counterparts. They wore long gowns made of silk or diaphanously fine cotton from Mosul (‘muslin’), embroidered with gold, as well as Indian cottons and scarves and sashes made of Chinese silk. Cyprus, Syria and Asia Minor were all sources of fustians, fine woollens and silks.

Cotton fibre had been first used in ancient Peruvian textiles and in India, spreading to Europe during the period of trade and conquest of the Roman Empire, although production remained in the East. In the in eleventh and twelfth centuries, Mediterranean trade cotton was used as an all-purpose material: not only for fabric but also for wadding and candlewicks. And although it is true that by the late-twelfth century Sicilian mills had come to dominate Western production of all manner of textiles by weaving textiles approximating the quality that the crusaders had earlier come to expect, perhaps the first textile to be manufactured in the West was isphanis, a cloth from Almeria.

Almeria, the city and province of south-east Spain, gets its name from the Andalusian Arabic Al-Mariyya, meaning ‘the mirror’. Referring to the reflective sea of this part of the Mediterranean, it also conveys the interchangeable nature of what constituted Eastern and Western dress at this time. In southern Europe, reaching into the southern Germanic principalities, Eastern dress was all but normative. Only the poorest were deprived of textiles originating from the East. By the time the Christians had begun to gain the upper hand in the early-thirteenth century, architecture, dress and decorative arts reflected profound Moorish influence. After the Christians defeated the Moors in 1212 at Las Navas de Tolosa, no effort was made to adopt different customs other than those relating to religion. The Moorish style remained constant until well into the fifteenth century, when it was deemed the height of lavishness in dress. When Granada fell in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella accepted its surrender clad in full Moorish dress. (Henceforth a Christian city, Muslims were allowed to practice their faith unmolested.) Silk in Spain continued to be produced in handsome qualities from the mills originally established by the Moors and evolved to be the outward sign of grandeur, distinction and prosperity.

It was relatively early when oriental motifs were subjected to Western imitation and slight alteration, again blurring the line between what was oriental and what was not. Production in Italy had helped to disseminate the popular floral curvilinear, ‘arabesque’ designs on both church and courtly dress by widening the repertoire of their oriental originals. Wavy tendrils and floral clusters became larger and bolder and were accompanied by thistles and fruits like pomegranates and berries, presaging the liberties taken with chintz wallpaper in the eighteenth century and beyond. Velvets and silks were embroidered and embossed with such designs in a way that showed that an open licence had been taken with the oriental idiom.

Justinian’s uneasiness over the economic consequences of the Western thirst for Eastern goods, particularly for fabrics, was echoed by countless others well into the Middle Ages, despite European cities having developed their own means of weaving clothing of comparable quality. Comparable but not equal—as early as the thirteenth century the Orient continued to exercise a spell over the West as the font of worldly goods of highest quality and sensuous magnificence. When it came to ceremonial garb for princes and those in high ecclesiastical office, oriental fabrics were de rigueur. Such fabrics were not limited to hats, capes, chasubles and surplices but were also used for ceremonial heraldic standards and for mitres and altar cloths. Although most examples of orientalist textiles have disappeared or deteriorated, examples of embroidery showing a Chinese-influenced fret pattern exist from the 1300s, and a painting of St Ursula by the Cologne Master shows her in a dress decorated with phoenixes in the Chinese style.⁴

‘Chinese style’ is a curious generalization which, like all assumed notional terms, ought not to be taken for granted, especially when surveyed from the vantage point of the difference between cultural reality and cultural influence. Both are subjective, but ‘cultural reality’ in the present sense refers to indigenous and endogenous perceptions of a given culture as opposed to how that culture is used as a feature, or specimen. In the latter case the culture is taken up in material signs in a near talismanic way, in which extracted signs—Chinese dragons, multilimbed Indian gods, turbaned men—are saturated with significance so as to embody a particular condition.

It was relatively early when oriental motifs were subjected to Western imitation and slight alteration, again blurring the line between what was oriental and what was not. Production in Italy had helped to disseminate the popular floral curvilinear, ‘arabesque’ designs on both church and courtly dress by widening the repertoire of their oriental originals. Wavy tendrils and floral clusters became larger and bolder and were accompanied by thistles and fruits like pomegranates and berries, presaging the liberties taken with chintz wallpaper in the eighteenth century and beyond. Velvets and silks were embroidered and embossed with such designs in a way that showed that an open licence had been taken with the oriental idiom.

As Antonia Finnane observes about Chinese clothing, European observers of Chinese clothing from the sixteenth to as late as the nineteenth century are re...