Clothing: A Global History (review)

Humans have used textiles and paint to adorn their bodies for thousands of years, but most historians have only fitfully included dress in their analyses. If it were not for the efforts of costume and art historians, this entire area of human endeavor might have been ignored completely. The reason for this lack of interest is not hard to find. With the rise of the fashion industry in the late seventeenth-century Europe and European men's rejection of colorful fabrics and personal adornment, dress became identified with women and their supposed capriciousness. How could anything that emphasized change for the sake of change, the motto of the fashion industry, provide any serious historical insights? In recent years, however, gender, economic, and cultural historians have produced new and exciting work that contextualizes clothing. By analyzing the production, consumption, and meaning of dress, these studies have challenged many long-held assumptions about economic, social, political, and cultural trends across the globe. No longer viewed as inconsequential, clothing has much to tell historians.

Robert Ross's new book, Clothing: A Global History, fits very neatly within this new historiography. His purpose is to "discuss the history of sartorial globalization from approximately the sixteenth century until the early years of the twenty-first." (9) Ross synthesizes the work of historians of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe to try and understand "cultural homogenization," (3) whereby most individuals from world leaders to peasants have come to wear remarkably similar clothing. Consequently, Ross's focus in this study is the spread of European dress across the globe. He begins with a discussion of sumptuary laws that linked dress and social status, arguing that challenges to these laws made way for the rise of fashion. Giving a brief history of fashion in Europe, Ross then proceeds to explain how Europeans made their clothing a key element in their drive to dominate the rest of the world. He places special emphasis on the role that missionaries played in spreading European dress to large areas of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Not surprisingly, this attempt to westernize met with resistance, and one easy way to resist colonialism was through clothing. Indeed, the best parts of Ross's book are those which show how "traditional" clothing was often created through interactions between Europeans and native peoples. Focusing on examples from India, Indonesia, and Africa, Ross analyzes how nationalists used clothing in a variety of ways to challenge their colonial masters and establish their own political credentials.

Ross has provided a thoughtful reading and synthesis of sartorial globalization, but not everyone will be content with his work. Ross tends to privilege English sartorial history over that of the French. Does it make sense to talk about Charles II's role in the sartorial transformation of male dress before addressing Louis XIV's contribution to sartorial glory and power at the French court? Jennifer Jones's work on the early modern French fashion industry and Clare Crowston's work on female garment workers would have allowed Ross to provide a more nuanced view of European trends. In Chapter 8 Ross discusses the introduction of European dress by fiat in Russia, Japan, and Turkey. This reviewer cannot speak to the Japanese and Turkish examples, but the Russian case is problematic. Based on just a handful of sources, Ross is unable to provide an accurate snapshot of Russia's complex sartorial landscape. He even claims that Alexander Pushkin, Russia's great nineteenth-century poet, wore primarily Russian dress, but this is simply not true. While it may seem churlish to ask an African historian to understand Russian dress history, it does highlight the problems of writing comprehensive histories such as this one. Even if a subject is allotted only a few pages, the information should be accurate. Gender historians will be disappointed not to find a more thorough analysis of how clothing shaped views of the body and the sexes in different societies. Finally, there are only sixteen illustrations in this book. Most of these photographs...