Clothing the Colony: Nineteenth-Century Philippine Sartorial Culture, 1820–1896 by Stephanie Coo (review)

Behind this pioneering work is the author's passion for clothing, which was inspired by the Chinese-Filipino milieu of her childhood; she grew up accustomed to seeing textiles treated as esteemed betrothal gifts for the bride's family. Clothing the Colony: Nineteenth-Century Philippine Sartorial Culture, 1820–1896 is based on Stephanie Coo's doctoral dissertation in cultural history at the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis. Of the existing literature on race, class, and gender in the Spanish colonial Philippines, none has examined these aspects through clothing and fashion as comprehensively as this one.

The first two of the six chapters provide the coordinates of colonial society: the class system and its dynamics, the combination of civilization and Catholicism that set colonial cultural standards, and the production and distribution of clothing. In the next chapters gender, class, and culture serve as the primary analytical categories. Inevitably race and occupation also come into play in varying degrees. In the chapter on women's clothing (chapter 3), for example, a variety of groups are distinguishable, such as convent schoolgirls, children, mestizas, and workers. To frame and scrutinize the class structure in the Spanish colonial Philippines, the author turns to sociologists Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen and those who have interpreted them. To validate her findings, Coo draws parallelisms between fashion and clothing practices in the Philippines and in other Asian colonies. Through the lens of dress, the author succeeds in refracting colonial life into its structural components and showing their interaction through time.

Teasing out the mutual implications of gender, class, occupation, and race is complex. Understandably, it becomes necessary to repeat information from one chapter to another, although perhaps with more careful editing the author could have reduced the repetition. It seems that due to the sheer amount of information some passages are repeated inadvertently as footnotes and vice versa, and footnotes are duplicated in different parts of the book. Also, while secondary sources serve mostly to provide background information, some subsections could have benefited from works that are more to the point: for example, those parts dealing with the educational system (145, 242–36).

Coo gathers more than a thousand sources, which she classifies into iconographic, material (actual pieces of clothing and textiles), and written. The resulting digital database is prodigious as may be gleaned from the texts and iconographic and sartorial material cited. For a book dealing with material culture and taking into account the limits of textual exposition, the magnanimous number of illustrations augments its vividness. The author systematizes the database not only by year and artist/author but also by the analytical categories used throughout the book: articles of clothing, gender, race, socioeconomic status, and occupation. Based on this body of sources, she observes that those sources dating from the 1820s became sufficiently substantial in number to make that decade a justifiable starting point of a study on clothing history. The terminal year of 1896 represents the historical watershed of the Philippine Revolution and eventual declaration of independence from Spain. From the corpus of sources that grew in number and in variety of genres roughly in the middle of the nineteenth century, coinciding with increasing prosperity, the author distinguishes significant changes in clothing style and practice after 1840. To help readers navigate the mass of sources, she takes pains to introduce the authors and artists whose works she cites.

Coo declares a basic point of difference between Clothing the Colony and other works on Philippine clothing: "More than being just about clothes, this book is also about the wearers, clothes workers, and traders" (3). Chapter 2, which discusses clothing material and production, describes the interaction among those three sectors while focusing on the producers. Individuals, classified by their role in these processes, emerge from the anonymous mass of laborers, as the author draws them out of textual and iconographic sources. Although based on typecast portrayals, whether pictorial or literary, the sinamayeras (cloth...