Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Maps
- Introduction: Fashioning the Atlantic world
- 1 Dress regimes at the dawn of the shared Atlantic
- 2 Acquiring imported textiles and dress
- 3 Redressing the indigenous Americas
- 4 Dress under constraint
- 5 Dressing free settlers in the “torrid zone”
- 6 Free settler dress in temperate zones
- 7 Atlantic dress regimes: fashions and meanings, implications and ironies
- Appendix 1: Sources for Tables 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
- Appendix 2: Inventory sources for free settler garment holdings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
7 - Atlantic dress regimes: fashions and meanings, implications and ironies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Maps
- Introduction: Fashioning the Atlantic world
- 1 Dress regimes at the dawn of the shared Atlantic
- 2 Acquiring imported textiles and dress
- 3 Redressing the indigenous Americas
- 4 Dress under constraint
- 5 Dressing free settlers in the “torrid zone”
- 6 Free settler dress in temperate zones
- 7 Atlantic dress regimes: fashions and meanings, implications and ironies
- Appendix 1: Sources for Tables 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
- Appendix 2: Inventory sources for free settler garment holdings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
The Hottentots, with their skins dressed up with grease and soot, and bucku-powder, are by this means in a great measure defended from the influence of the air, and may in a manner reckon themselves full dressed. In other respects, both men and women are wont to appear quite undressed; indeed, I may say naked, except a trifling covering, with which they always conceal certain parts of their bodies. With the men this covering consists of a bag or flap made of skin, hanging quite open … [T]he females of this nation cover themselves much more scrupulously than the men. They seldom content themselves with one covering, but almost always have two, and very often three. These are made of a prepared and well-greased skin, and are fastened about their bodies with a thong, almost like the aprons of our ladies.
In other respects, the garment worn by the Hottentot for covering their bodies is a sheep-skin, with the wooly side turned inwards; this pellisse, or a cloak made of some smaller fur, is tied forwards over the breast … [I]n rainy and cold weather they wrap it round them; so that the fore part of the body likewise, is in some measure covered with it as far as almost to the knees … [Men] who live nearest to the colonists, fancy the European hats, [women] a cap in the form of a short cone … Over this cap they sometimes wear another ornament, consisting of an oval wreath, or, if the reader pleases, a crown made of a buffalo's hide …
In his mid-1770s description, the Swedish naturalist and abolitionist Anders Sparrman not only acknowledges the protection that their dress affords the Khoikhoi but goes on to narrate in admiring detail women's expensive shell necklaces, glass bead “apron” adornments, and “crowns” bedecked with Indian Ocean cowries; the blue and white beaded sashes and numerous leather and metal rings both genders wore around their arms and legs; and the leather “field shoes” that they put on to traverse scorching or rugged terrain.
Besides the tenacious European conflation of non-European dress with undress, what is most striking about Sparrman's report – or with images of Khoikhoi in contemporary depictions like Plate 7b – is the persistence of the dress itself.
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- The Material AtlanticClothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800, pp. 225 - 243Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015