Fashion:The Mirror of History
Posted in Reviews on Wed Nov 15, 06 by Kyle under Books and Fashion.
I must extend my most sincere digital apologies for neglecting this blog for aeons of internet time. Life and work have been keeping me quite busy lately. Furthermore after sitting at a computer all day long who wants to do so for one’s miniscule remainder of the evening..? I’ve been finding myself inclined to recline in bed and read the evening away instead of basking away the night in the phosphorescent rays of of the blogosphere.
Halloween festivities revived my interest in a good costume, so in my spare moments I’ve been reading through Fashion: The Mirror of History by Michael and Ariane Batterberry. It is quite the compendious tome, and thusly I haven’t finished it yet. I have managed to read my way from Ur and Egypt all the way up to the court finery of baroque-era France. Only a couple more centuries to make it through…
It is much what you would expect from a book of this kind. Many, many illustrations accompany the text which looks at not only the clothes themselves but also the social conditions that accompanied their creation. The book is not heavy on technical details of how things were made, so it serves better as inspiration and enlightenment than a source for details to be used for recreation, studious examination of the pictures aside. Written in 1977 and republished in 1982, the books is full of small telling details that themselves hail from the mirror of history.
A preeminent example is the use of the word “Oriental.” I have a feeling that today such a word would be whisked away by the stroke of an editor’s pen before the book even got escaped manuscript phase. Sartorial efforts are not the only endeavors that bow to the whims of fashion. What makes the use of this word more curious is that this liberally peppered “Oriental” is not applied to the residents of eastern Asia which the book barely mentions outside of the silk trade, but to the residents of what we now call the Middle East, both pre- and post-Islamic. Of course all oriental means is “of the east”, so one could contend that the change is usage is indicative of the contemporary change in the scope of global cultural and material commerce.
Another aspect of the book that I found interesting was the drastic change in costume between breakaway Protestants and established Catholics during the Reformation. Clothing like other aspects of visual culture always has an ideological and signifying component, but this particular split makes it as clear as wool and linen in black and white and gold silk brocade, ermine, and purple velvet. I wonder what my aesthetic leanings say about my ideological underpinnings..?