Clothing: a Global History: Or, The Imperialists' New Clothes (review)

Ross' purpose in Clothing: a Global History is to explain how, when, and why Western dress orders have become global, even as they have taken on rich nuances of locality, gender, ethnicity, political affiliation, and class distinction. His book is a successful synthesis of social, political, and economic history with the recent wave of research on clothing and costume that places apparel into larger contexts of material and performance culture.

Ross argues that because Western dress was the first to be industrially produced, it became for many in the Third World a symbol of modernity and progress. He adduces evidence from such diverse examples as Peter the Great's sartorial reforms in seventeenth-century Moscow (106–110), Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's national-dress campaign in the 1920s (113–117), Christian missions in the Pacific Islands (83–102), and black nationalist South Africans during the second decade of the twentieth century (123–125). Dressing like a representative of the hegemonic power was significant not only for subaltern peoples but also, in the twentieth century, for women, who signaled their equality with men by putting on trousers (146).

Conversely, for some indigenous peoples under colonialism, since Western dress was a symbol of oppression, dress orders based on traditional revivalism were instituted for formal occasions, as in the case of Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana in the 1960s (128–129). As Trevor-Roper has documented for the Scottish kilt, these supposed "revivals" of "native dress" bore little resemblance to what had actually been worn before the conquest of the population in question but were often imaginatively cut, as it were, from whole cloth.¹ But historical authenticity, as Ross points out, was irrelevant: "What is seen as ethnic dress is . . . almost by definition, distinct from the general pattern which has increasingly spread across the globe. The message it is meant to send out is of local affinity, not of universalism" (135).

Ross makes his points in a lively, readable style (only slightly marred by poor copy editing). Readers are invited to engage in sartorial thought experiments that illuminate Ross' points. In his discussion of "Reforming the Body: Reforming the Mind" in Chapter 8, for example, he calls attention to the role of Western clothing in the globalized environment of air travel by contrasting the vague references to national dress worn by flight attendants on such national airlines as Nippon, and the universality of Western dress worn by pilots. "Would anyone feel comfortable," Ross asks, "in a plane knowing that the pilot was wearing a sarong?" The modern uniform signifies the wearer's modern technological competence.

Clothing: A Global History is a short book, and an easy read that adds a fresh perspective to studies of global history, colonialism, economic development, military history, and the history of costume.