Getting dressed: material, rank, work

A long yellow silk robe, sleeves outstretched, embroidered with dragons, clouds and, at the bottom, bands of coloured waves. — Court robe of an emperor of China (Qing dynasty, late eighteenth century): yellow silk embroidered with dragons; yellow was reserved for the emperor and his consorts. Anonymous (China, Qing dynasty), CC0, source

The oldest known thread is more than thirty thousand years old. The Scottish costume, believed to be immemorial, is about three hundred.

Two surprises to begin with, and they point in opposite directions.

What is really old

In Dzudzuana Cave, at the foot of the Caucasus, in Georgia, researchers found fibres of wild flax — gathered, not cultivated. Carbon dating places the layers concerned between thirty-two thousand and twenty-six thousand years before the present.¹

Three characteristics make them extraordinary. The fibres are spun, dyed and knotted — and this, according to the authors, is common in these layers.²

Spun: fibres twisted around one another form a strong thread, whereas single fibres slip.
Knotted: so they were put to use — for hafting stone tools, weaving baskets, perhaps sewing garments.
Dyed: and not in a single colour. Black, turquoise, pink and grey have been recorded — shades that the plants of the region could provide.³

This last point is decisive. It means that colour did not come later, as a luxury indulged in once necessities are secured. As soon as people know how to make thread, they colour it — and they give it several colours.

These fibres are invisible to the naked eye. They appear only under the microscope, in clay samples taken from the floor of the cave: eighty-six samples of fifty grams each.⁴

The circumstances of the discovery are instructive. These samples had been collected to look for pollen in them — that is, to find out which plants grew there in different periods, and therefore what the climate was like. The fibres turned up in them.⁵

Nobody was looking for clothes. This is often how discoveries are made.

One reservation, for the sake of completeness: the following year, other researchers published an objection in the same journal. They argue that the method used — comparing under the microscope with modern flax — is not enough to establish that it really is flax. The team stood by its conclusions. The age and the twisting, however, are not disputed: what is disputed is the name of the plant.⁶

What seems old and is not

Next comes the kilt.

The garment of the Scottish Highlands, until the eighteenth century (the years 1700 to 1799), was a large piece of cloth draped around the body and held in place by a belt. A practical outfit for walking across the moors.

According to a famous thesis, set out by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, an English industrialist is said to have come to the Highlands in the eighteenth century to run a blast furnace. He employed local workers and noticed that this great drape was cumbersome for working in front of a fire.⁷

So he sent for a tailor and asked him to separate the lower part to make a garment of its own. This, supposedly, was the short kilt, the one we know.

The same historian sums the matter up bluntly: this garment was supposedly meant to ease the transformation of the Highlanders’ way of life — to move them from the moor to the factory.⁸

One reservation, as with the Caucasus fibres: this attribution is disputed. Historians of Scotland argue that forms of short kilt already existed, and that Trevor-Roper relied on late testimony.⁹

As for tartans, those checked patterns supposed to identify each family, they are more recent still. In the nineteenth century a book appeared that claimed to reproduce an old manuscript giving the “authentic” patterns of each clan. Its authors claimed to be descendants of the kings of Scotland.¹⁰

The book was exposed shortly after its publication: it is a forgery, and its authors impostors. Yet many of its patterns became the official tartans of the clans.

A clarification, for the sake of accuracy: some historians find this account a little too clear-cut. The great drape was indeed a Highland garment, and checked cloth has been woven for a long time and almost everywhere. What can be dated is the short form, the clan patterns, and the forgery.

What the material imposes

Many garments owe their shape to the way they are made.

On a backstrap loom — one end tied to a post, the other to the waist of the person weaving — the width of the cloth is limited by that of their waist: usually no more than half a metre.¹¹

The result is narrow strips, which are sewn edge to edge to make garments.

It is not a choice of style. It is a constraint that has become a form.

What one is allowed to wear

Many authorities have legislated on clothing: which cloth, which colour, which jewel, according to rank or trade. Such laws are found in Europe, in China, in Japan. Dressing people differently is a simple way of making a hierarchy visible.

A specific case illustrates this. At the end of the eighteenth century, in Louisiana, then under Spanish rule, the governor issued an edict. One of its provisions required free women of African descent to cover their hair with a knotted headscarf — the same one worn by enslaved women — and forbids them certain adornments.¹²

The motive is known. In New Orleans, many of these women were traders or property owners, and the Spanish government wanted to define the status of free people of colour more clearly, to prevent them from becoming too powerful. The edict placed these women alongside enslaved women, not white women.¹³

What happened next is more uncertain, and it is important to say so.

The story that circulates is appealing: these women are said to have obeyed to the letter, but with silk headscarves, embroidered, adorned with feathers and jewels, turning a humiliation into a sign of elegance.

Some historians maintain this. Some portraits suggest it. But these portraits are later (one of them dates from 1837, half a century after the edict), and in the same period, women of European high society also wore turbans, as a matter of fashion.¹⁴

A rigorous distinction must therefore be made: the law and its intention are established. What it led to is recounted on the strength of clues, without direct proof.

Even so, two things must not be confused: doubting a piece of evidence is not denying a fact. The constraint did exist, and nothing indicates that these women endured it passively.

Who makes what we wear

The label of a simple T-shirt is enough to raise the question.

In the nineteenth century, when machine-spun yarn arrived in India at low prices, Indian weavers are said to have been ruined and to have disappeared. Many did something else: they bought this industrial yarn, and they went on weaving with it.¹⁵

This is not a detail. To tell the story of a domination without telling what those subjected to it did amounts to describing them a second time as if they had done nothing.

Today, most of the clothes sold in Europe are sewn very far away.

On 24 April 2013, near the capital of Bangladesh, a building housing several garment workshops collapsed. More than eleven hundred people died.¹⁶

Cracks had appeared in the walls the day before. The bank and the shops on the lower floors closed that very morning. The women and men working in the workshops above were ordered to go up to work.

What followed matters too. International brands signed an agreement with the unions that binds them: independent inspectors visit the buildings, and the results are published. Ten years later, the International Labour Organization considers the sector safer, while stressing that problems remain.¹⁷

Note 1

A unique finding of wild flax fibers from a series of Upper Paleolithic layers at Dzudzuana Cave, located in the foothills of the Caucasus, Georgia

Kvavadze, Eliso et al., “30,000-Year-Old Wild Flax Fibers”, Science, vol. 325, 11 September 2009, p. 1359

Radiocarbon dates demonstrate that the cave was inhabited intermittently during several periods dated to 32 to 26 thousand years before the present

Kvavadze, Eliso et al., “30,000-Year-Old Wild Flax Fibers”, Science, vol. 325, 11 September 2009, p. 1359

What is really old

What seems old and is not

What the material imposes

What one is allowed to wear

Who makes what we wear

Notes and sources

Bibliography