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
1 - Dress regimes at the dawn of the shared Atlantic
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
Women [of the court] wear three kinds of wrappers [traverse] from the waist down, one down to the heel, the second shorter, the third shorter yet, each one fringed, tied diagonally, and slit in front: from breast to waist they are dressed in a doublet, and all these garments are made of palm cloth, and over their shoulders a cape of the same material. They walk around with faces uncovered and with a little cap similar to men's. Middling women dress in the same way, but of cheaper cloth, and slaves and low-class women are apparelled only from the waist down, otherwise going naked.
So announced Filippo Pigafetta in a passage on “the clothing of that people, before they became Christians, and after” in his 1591 Account of the Kingdom of Kongo and Surrounding Lands, Based on the Writings and Words of the Portuguese Duarte Lopez. A Portuguese merchant who spent 1578–83 in west Central Africa, Lopez then served as envoy of King Alvare I of Kongo to papal Rome, where he met and frequently conversed with the Italian Pigafetta, himself a one-time papal emissary; out of these meetings was born the Account. Lopez was one of many European merchants, missionaries, and travelers who reported on the lifeways of the diverse peoples with whom they came in contact across the nascent Atlantic world. Some of their works were sketchy, superficial, filled with errors and fabrications. Others, however, were discerning, richly detailed, proto-ethnographic expositions, frequently accompanied by engravings that illustrated or supplemented the text. Despite inaccuracies, omissions, and blind spots, writings of the latter type make it possible to delineate Atlantic dress regimes just as movement and exchange began to intensify throughout the basin from the early seventeenth century.
Dress encounters: cues and codes
The authors of these works had good reason to comment upon dress. Readers expected information about commercial possibilities in newly explored regions, particularly for goods like apparel textiles that had long been valuable and valued trade commodities. Their own experience, moreover, had taught Europeans that social and cultural cues and codes were woven into clothing, adornments, and their deployment. Hence knowledge about dress practices would yield insight into such crucial matters as class and gender structures, receptivity to unfamiliar religious, diplomatic, and material influences, and level of development of peoples previously unknown to them.
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- The Material AtlanticClothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800, pp. 23 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015