Was Fashion A European Invention

Journal of Global History (2008) 3, pp.
419–443 ª London School of Economics and Political Science 2008

doi:10.1017/S1740022808002787
Was fashion a European

invention?*
Carlo Marco Belfanti

Department of Social Sciences, University of Brescia, Via S. Faustino 74B, 25122 Brescia, Italy
E-mail: belfanti@eco.unibs.it
Abstract
Fashion was arguably a social phenomenon that emerged in Europe during early modern times,
and this paper seeks to determine whether it was unknown in the refined civilizations of the East.
The conclusion is that fashion was not a European invention. The analysis of the evolution of
Indian, Chinese, and Japanese clothing systems underlines how these societies underwent
phases in which, thanks to propitious economic conditions, the accentuated propensity towards
consumption stimulated behaviour that challenged the traditional hierarchies of appearance,
usually regulated by canons of a prescriptive nature. Fashion was not, therefore, a European
invention, but it only fully developed as a social institution in Europe, while in India, China,
and Japan it only evolved partially, without being able to obtain full social recognition.
Eurocentrism in question
The coming of fashion created a new world, in which a passion for novelty, combined with
rapid changes in taste, interrupted a tradition of well-established habits in the ways of dress-
ing and the significance attributed to clothing. It is customary to distinguish between societ-
ies in which dress style was not subject to frequent cyclical change and those where rapid
changes in clothing styles were the rule. In the former case we speak of ‘costume’, in the
latter of ‘fashion’.1 The rise of fashion represents a turning point in the history of human
societies, in that it introduced a new system of values to the social structure.2 Fashion could
condition the behaviour of the protagonists, with regard both to individual choice and to
strategies adopted by economic organizations. On the basis of well-founded arguments
advanced by social scientists, fashion can be considered as a social institution, which regu-
lates the alternation of cyclical changes in dress styles, and which supersedes the previous
regulation based on prescriptive principles.3 Fashion can also be considered as a system of
The author would like to thank the referees and editors for their comments and suggestions.
1 René König, Menschheit auf dem Laufsteg: die Mode im Zivilisationprozess, Munich: Carl Hauser
Verlag, 1985. See also Daniel Roche, La culture des apparences: une histoire du vêtement XVIIe–XVIIIe
siècles, Paris: Fayard, 1989, pp. 50–3; Daniel Roche, Histoire des choses banales: naissance de la
consommation dans les sociétés traditionelles (XVIIe–XIXe siècles), Paris: Fayard, 1997.
2 Gilles Lipovetsky, L’empire de l’éphèmere: la mode et son destin dans les sociétés modernes, Paris:
Gallimard, 1987, pp. 25–8.
3 A neat synthesis is proposed by Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology: an introduction to fashion studies,
Oxford: Berg, 2005.
419
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022808002787 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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420 j C A R L O M A R C O B E L F A N T I
rules in which sanctions are applied by expressions of disapproval, ridicule, and ostracism.4
This assumption implies two essential elements: constant change in styles, and the power of
individuals to follow changes without institutional restrictions. It can thus be considered
that the ‘fashion phenomenon’ was present, to a greater or lesser extent, in those societies
in which these two elements were to be found. Needless to say, it was not a sudden or rapid
transition but rather a gradual and progressive, though irreversible, change.
Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in Europe emerged an increasing
awareness of a ‘culture of fashion’ or, rather, a mature reflection on the phenomenon and
its social implications,5 but there was also the idea that fashion was a characteristic
typical of European society, unknown in the refined civilizations of the East.6 Travellers
tales contributed to this notion, such as the diary of Jean Chardin, who visited Persia in
the second half of the seventeenth century: ‘Dress in the East is not subject to fashion; it
is always made in the same way and . . . the Persians . . . do not vary the colours, shades,
and types of material any more than the style.’7 Similar considerations occur in relation
to China at the end of the eighteenth century: ‘Dress is seldom altered in China from fancy
or fashion. Whatever is thought suitable to the condition of the wearer, or to the season of
the year continues generally, under similar circumstances, to be the same. Even among the
ladies, there is little variety in their dresses, except, perhaps, in the disposition of the flowers
or other ornaments of the head.’8 The belief arose that fashion was a distinctive character-
istic of European society, while the Orient was distinguished by the absence of changing
cycles in clothing style.
Recent historiography has enriched this analysis by pertinent comparisons and well-
constructed arguments without, however, changing its basic premise. Fernand Braudel, in
his fundamental work on material civilization, placed fashion within the economic and
social context of the age that had generated it, dealing with the topic in a comparative per-
spective. On the basis of the lively tales of travellers and contemporary observers, Braudel
illustrates the substantially static state of the clothing systems in the Ottoman Empire, India,
China, and Japan, as opposed to those of the Europe of fashion. He argues that such a
different evolution is to be explained by the dynamics of divergent social change. While,
in the West, the advent of fashion reflected a significant level of change, in the East, the
immutability of appearances was a symptom of rigid hierarchies.9
4 Georg Simmel, Die Mode, Berlin: Pan Verlag, 1905.

5 Roche, Culture des apparences; Daniel L. Purdy, The tyranny of elegance: consumer cosmopolitanism in
the era of Goethe, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998; David Kuchta, The three-
piece suit and modern masculinity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002; Aileen Ribeiro,
Dress in eighteenth-century Europe, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002; Woodruff D. Smith,
Consumption and the making of respectability 1600–1800, New York: Routledge, 2002; Jennifer M.
Jones, Sexing la mode: gender, fashion and commercial culture in old regime France, Oxford: Berg, 2004;
Maxine Berg, Luxury and pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
6 For a recent survey, see Antonia Finnane, Changing clothes in China, New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008, pp. 19–41.
7 Quoted by Fernand Braudel, Civilization and capitalism: the structures of everyday life, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1992, p. 323.
8 Quoted by Braudel, Civilization and capitalism, p. 312.
9 Ibid., pp. 311–24.

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W A S F A S H I O N A E U R O P E A N I N V E N T I O N ? j 421
Braudel’s interpretation forms the basis for others. Neil McKendrick, author of a pio-
neering paper on fashion in eighteenth-century English society, considers that widespread
poverty and social immobility hindered the advent of fashion outside Europe, whereas in
Europe it was established with particular characteristics.10 Gilles Lipovetsky, in a stimulat-
ing volume dedicated to fashion in modern societies, places stability in dress styles and sys-
tems of imperial power in direct connection, comparing the empires of antiquity to those of
the Orient. In his view, the emergence of fashion as a typical aspect of European society was
the product of a series of social conditions that emerged only in Europe, such as court soci-
ety, the model of aristocratic life, the development of cities, and, above all, the rise of the
individual, recognized as having the right to make free choices.11
This is hardly an unfounded theory but it is probably excessively simplistic to subsume
three centuries of history, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth, and three civilizations –
Indian, Chinese, and Japanese – into such a binary description. Although linked by appar-
ently similar despotisms, they were profoundly different in terms of religion, culture, eco-
nomy, and institutions. Western opinion may therefore be lacking in depth, partly because
it is conditioned by the blinding European experience of frenetic changeover to fashion,
and partly because the criteria that regulated the mechanisms of Eastern fashion may have
been more subtle and less easily perceived by a Western observer. Commencing precisely
from the latter objection, the authoritative Indian historian Kirti Chaudhuri has challenged
the ‘Euro-centric’ vision of the eastern civilizations as societies without fashion.12 Peter
Burke, who pays great attention to the cultural dimension of the processes of change, has
taken up the challenge, offering a stimulating comparative analysis of the tendency to con-
sume luxury goods in Europe, China, and Japan, and highlighting unexpected analogies. In
particular, the growing and widespread propensity to conspicuous, showy consumption of
food and drink, furnishings, objets d’art, and fabric as an expression of successfully scaling
the social ladder, seems to have been common to European, Chinese, and Japanese societies
in the early modern age.13 Burke challenges the assumption that Eastern despotism impeded
forms of social mobility; but a wider participation in the consumption of luxury goods does
not necessarily determine the start of fashion cycles.
Fashion is an aspect of the comparative reconstruction proposed by the sinologist
S. A. M. Adshead, who not only espouses Burke’s evaluation of a similarity in the propen-
sity to consume in West and East but also pushes the revision of the Eurocentric tradition to
the point of maintaining that fashion was a Chinese invention, dating from the age of the
Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). It was the work of the empress Yang Kuei-fei, defined as the
Chinese Madame Pompadour, whose style influenced European taste in the late Middle
Ages. Such primacy did not however undergo developments comparable to those in Europe
10 Neil McKendrick, ‘The commercialization of fashion’, in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and John H.
Plumb, eds., The birth of a consumer society: the commercialization of eighteenth-century England,
London: Europa Publications, 1982, pp. 36–42.
11 Gilles Lipovetsky, L’empire de l’éphémère, pp. 30–1, 55, 71.
12 Kirti N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: economy and civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the rise of
Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 182–90.
13 Peter Burke, ‘Res et verba: conspicuous consumption in the early modern world’, in John Brewer and
Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the world of goods, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 148–61.

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from the eighteenth century onwards, which made it the incubator of the modern world:
fashion may have arisen and been established in China long before it was in Europe, but
it did not succeed in becoming an institution of modernity.14
We owe to Kenneth Pomeranz a balanced focus on the question. According to this scho-
lar, early modern Europe and Asia did not experience forms and levels of propensity to con-
sume that were radically diverse. Indeed, the economic and social motivations that underlay
the wish to acquire and show off luxury goods in European societies were no different from
the aspirations that fed conspicuous consumption in China and Japan. However, while pre-
monitory signs were visible, the advent of fashion as an institution was hindered by the
political and social evolution of the Qing era.15 The impression given is that, on the one
hand, fashion did not develop as a social institution destined to become a salient trait of
modernity but, on the other hand, the great Asian civilizations did express peculiar forms
of sensibility and consideration for the social significance of dress, as well as cycles of
change in taste in clothing.16 These latter aspects merit some further pondering.
Tradition and change in the Indian experience

The clothing status quo in ‘traditional’ India was based on pieces of fabric used to wrap the
body, employing various draping techniques.17 This tendency emerged under the influence
of the Brahmin Hindu priestly caste, who celebrated their rites wearing only draped cloth,
because items of clothing made by cutting and stitching were considered impure.18 Although
this view was widespread, the making of items of clothing was carried out in various areas
of India, using a notable variety of techniques in relation to the fabric, the width, and the
drape, as well as combinations with other elements of clothing. This was determined by
interaction with regional customs and habits, and with the traditions of various ethnic
groups. These fundamental elements of the Indian culture of appearance, albeit existing in
multiple local variants, represented an underlying constant in the clothing system of the sub-
continent, which survived political, religious, and social transformations.19 Consider, for
example, the longevity of the sari.20 Perhaps it was precisely the persistence over a very
long period of some ‘typical’ elements of Indian costume that misled Western observers,
14 S. A. M. Adshead, Material culture in Europe and China, 1400–1800, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.
15 Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe and the making of the modern world economy,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 157–65. For a more recent survey, see Finnane,
Changing clothes in China, pp. 1–17.
16 Craig Clunas, ‘Modernity, global and local: consumption and the rise of the West’, American Historical
Review, 104, 5, 1999, pp. 1497–1511.
17 For the pre-Mughal period, see Ramesh P. Mohapatra, Fashion styles of ancient India: dress and
costumes, New Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1992.
18 Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, p. 183.
19 B. N. Goswamy, Indian costumes in the collection of the Calico Museum of Textiles, Ahmedabad: Calico
Museum, 1993; see also Govind S. Ghurye, Indian costume, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1966.
20 Linda Lynton, The sari, London: Thames and Hudson, 1995; Mujulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller, The
sari, Oxford: Berg, 2003.

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causing them to believe that the whole culture of appearance in India could be summed up
in stasis. In fact, between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, heterogeneous Indian
societies were anything but adverse to adopting new ways of expression in the strategies
of appearance, demonstrating that they knew how to metabolize external influences through
transformation and adaptation.21
The evolution of clothing in pre-modern India went through many significant phases,
which can be followed in the literature.22 Here, the intention is to probe the important dis-
continuity represented by the advent of the Islamic Mughals, who subdued India in the
course of the sixteenth century.23 Recently, the tradition that attributed the introduction
of sewn items of clothing to the arrival of the Mughals has been rejected, because it has
been demonstrated that Indians knew and practised tailoring techniques before that
time.24 That said, it is difficult to ascertain how widespread the use of sewn garments
was, given the draped clothing of Hindu tradition.25 The installation of the new Mughal
order gave a decided impulse to the adoption of clothing made by tailoring, even if it did
not determine the extinction of the Indian costume under Brahmin ascendancy.26
The clothing cultures of the two religious groups were decidedly different in origin. The
founder of the Mughal dynasty, Babur (1483–1530), noted in wonder that agricultural
labourers and the lower classes in India went around practically naked. However, his suc-
cessors pursued a farseeing and efficient policy, aimed at integrating Islamic and Central
Asian cultural components with local traditions, by harmonizing clothing. Akbar (1542–
1605) carried out a true strategy of clothing integration, revolving around the definition
of a style through which Mughals and Indians could simultaneously recognize and distin-
guish each other. Akbar’s action was made concrete through the recovery of some types
of clothing already in use, which he modified, thus achieving the double objective of freeing
the renewed articles from ties with tradition on the one hand, and conferring on them the
legitimization of a royal imprimatur on the other. Akbar’s reform touched principally on
three elements of male attire: the tunic, the trousers, and the turban. The tunic (jama),
which could also be worn without a shirt, came down to the knees. It was made of an upper
section that fitted tight to the chest, tied at the waist by a cloth belt, and of a lower section
that, from the waist down, widened out into wide, tightly pleated strips, like a skirt. The
tunic was accompanied by long tight-fitting trousers (payjama), which covered the legs
down to the ankles.27
21 Goswamy, Indian costumes, p. 1.

22 Ghurye, Indian costume, pp. 1–30; Mohapatra, Fashion styles of ancient India, pp. 1–100; Shiv N. Dar,
Costumes of India and Pakistan: a historical and cultural study, Bombay: D.B. Taraporevala Sons and
Co. Pr. Ltd., 1982, pp. 1–35; Goswamy, Indian costumes, pp. 9–14.
23 John F. Richards, The Mughal empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
24 Ghurye, Indian costume, pp. 207–8; Goswamy, Indian costumes, pp. 1–14.
25 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Cloth, clothes and colonialism in India’, in Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider,
eds., Cloth and human experience, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989, pp. 331–3.
26 Ghurye, Indian costume, pp. 130–6; Dar, Costumes of India, p. 48.
27 Ghurye, Indian costume, pp.129–30; Dar, Costumes of India, pp. 43–7; Goswamy, Indian costumes,
pp. 14–18.

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The turban, like the other garments re-invented by Akbar, belonged to Indian clothing
history, and was traditionally charged with symbolic meaning.28 In the renewed version,
as the ‘Mughal turban’, it became the distinctive head covering of the new order. For Akbar,
the integration of the two principal groups in his kingdom was an objective of primary
importance to ensure peaceful coexistence, but he was conscious that differences of a cul-
tural and, more importantly, of a religious nature did exist. Therefore he did not neglect
to exploit the communicative potential of dress to make these differences visible, albeit in
the most discreet manner. Hindus and Muslims were to fasten the tunic in two distinct
ways, the former at the left underarm and the latter at the right.29 This way of dealing
with the policy of appearances showed a mature awareness of the importance of clothing
in the manipulation of the representation of identity.
The importance of the court for the establishment of the dress model implemented by
Akbar was of a double nature. On the one hand, court ritual prescribed that those who
were admitted into the sovereign’s circle should be dressed according to the dictates of
Mughal style. On the other hand, the luxury of the clothes worn by the monarch and by
the courtiers became the reference frame for elegance.30 Akbar’s successor, Jahangir
(1605–27), followed in the wake of his father, introducing an article of clothing that was
Kurdish in origin, a sleeveless over-tunic called a nadiri. The use of this was exclusive to
the sovereign himself, or to those who had been given it as his personal gift. Certainly,
the rise of the courtly style did not lead to the disappearance of traditional modes of dress,
but it is to the centres of power, such as Delhi, Agra, and Lahore (around which the court
gravitated), that we must look in order to grasp the most interesting phenomena of innova-
tion and change in taste.31
European travellers visiting important centres in northern India, such as Surat and
courtly Agra, did not fail to underline the search for distinction through clothing, with
Pietro Della Valle making reference to the turban and Jean Thévenot to trousers.32 During
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian dress taste was transformed by a growing
tendency to excess and extravagance, which offers similarities to the European experience.
Competition between turban and hat was only one aspect of such an evolution. The reign
of Aurangzeb (1657–1707) was distinguished, for example, by exaggeration in the width
of items of apparel: turban, jama, and payjama became increasingly wider, longer, and
more voluminous. In contrast, in the final decades of the eighteenth century, the trend
was inverted and a decided orientation towards a reduction of the dimensions of the various
items of clothing set in. In the eighteenth century, there was also a desire to show off a
28 Mohapatra, Fashion styles of ancient India: hair styles and coiffures, pp. 1–85 (second part, with new
pagination, of Fashion styles of ancient India); Goswamy, Indian costumes, pp. 7–8; Dar, Costumes of
India, pp. 47, 96–8; Cohn, ‘Cloth’, pp. 313–16.
29 Ghurye, Indian costume, p. 210; Dar, Costumes of India, pp. 43–4; Goswamy, Indian costumes, p. 16.
30 Chris A. Bayly, ‘The origins of swadeshi (home industry): cloth and Indian society’, in Arjun Appadurai,
ed., The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986, pp. 297–301; Goswamy, Indian costumes, pp. 17–18; Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, p. 188.
31 Ghurye, Indian costume, pp. 130–6; Dar, Costumes of India, p. 48.
32 Pietro Della Valle, De’ viaggi di Pietro Della Valle . . ., Roma: Vitale Mascardi, 1663, vol. 3, p. 34; Jean
Thévenot, Troisième partie des voyages de M. de Thévenot contenant la relation de l’Indostan, des
nouveaux Mogoles et des autres peuples et pays de l’Inde, Paris: Claude Barbin, 1684, p. 104.

j
martial attitude. This was expressed by a warrior ‘look’, constructed by allowing the beard
to grow in the Sikh manner, by wearing armour breastplates, and by carrying ornamental
weapons.33
These garments far from exhaust the multiplicity of solutions and combinations avail-
able, since only the most emblematic elements have been dealt with. The variety of climatic
conditions, cultural traditions, and religious convictions within the subcontinent makes any
account of the kaleidoscope of Indian clothing extremely arduous. However, this brief
examination suggests that cycles of change in clothing taste did exist and that there was
mature awareness of such a phenomenon, as indicated in literature and popular culture.34
This might, however, be seen as a form of conspicuous consumption, reserved for the
high ranks. Kenneth Pomeranz maintains that this was the dynamic in Indian society, which,
unlike China and Japan, was not completely free from the prescriptive character that regu-
lated clothing consumption, and therefore remained impermeable to the advent of fashion.
Furthermore, the distribution of incomes maintained a strong polarization, precluding wider
access to the game of appearances.35 However, Pomeranz himself admits that ‘in addition to
aristocrats, Indian towns and cities from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries fea-
tured growing numbers of clerks, small to medium-sized merchants, and others who often
purchased non-necessities’.36
These remarks seem to find confirmation in the passion for elegance that affected Indian
society, in particular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the point that even
those with limited economic resources did not eschew an elegant outfit to show off in public,
whilst wearing much simpler attire in daily life.37 How much society was permeable to wider
forms of consumption depended also on the mode of regulating social relationships. As
Pomeranz puts it: ‘Thus, even if Indian ‘‘luxury’’ and ‘‘fashion’’ resembled Japanese, Western
European, and Chinese developments more closely than I have argued here, its social rela-
tions and labor systems probably ensured that such impulses affected a much smaller propor-
tion of the population.’38 The function that was carried out by sumptuary laws in Europe was
devolved to caste relations in India.39 The effects produced on clothing by such a regulatory
mechanism intersected and were superimposed on very strong local traditions, which could
differ significantly from region to region. Thus, for example, the collectors of palm sap des-
tined for the production of alcohol from Malabar and the east coast were not permitted to
wear shoes or gold ornaments. Also in Malabar, with the sole exception of Brahmins, all
men were formally forbidden to cover the chest above the waist.40 According to the Indian
scholar S. N. Dar, however, economic and social condition contributed to determining the
33 Dar, Costumes of India, pp. 51–5; Goswamy, Indian costumes, pp. 18–20.
34 Dar, Costumes of India, pp. 55–71; Goswamy, Indian costumes, p. 20.
35 Pomeranz, The great divergence, pp. 127–30, 145–9.
36 Ibid., p. 148.
37 Dar, Costumes of India, pp. 55–6.
38 Pomeranz, The great divergence, p. 148.
39 Ghurye, Indian costume, p. 21.
40 Govind S. Ghurye, ‘Features of the caste system’, in Dipankar Gupta, ed., Social stratification, Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 35–48.

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consumer’s choice in clothing at least as strongly as their membership of a particular caste.41

Kirti Chaudhuri, too, has offered a vision of caste as more malleable and flexible than has
been imagined. Phenomena of gains in wealth or, in constrat, of deterioration in the condi-
tions of life, produced strong pressure towards change.42
It is currently difficult to determine whether undoubted changes in clothing styles suc-
ceeded in penetrating down through social ‘classes’, becoming – for those who knew how
to show they were ‘trendy’ – a means to achieve social mobility. As a consequence, it is
extremely arduous to estimate whether the move from a system limited by criteria of a pre-
scriptive nature to one regulated by fashion as an institution actually took place, even if it
seems sensible not to exclude such an eventuality. It is plausible to believe that the aware-
ness of the communicative value of appearance had matured into a ‘culture of dress’ but,
perhaps, not yet a ‘culture of fashion’. The Indian situation might remind us, solely with ref-
erence to the clothing system, of the French at the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King. This was
an age dominated by the court as the centre of elaboration of taste, during which elegance
and luxury still represented a hendiadys, with opportunities within the reach of well-defined
social strata, as, for example, the aristocracy and the nouveau riche à la Monsieur Jourdain,
Molière’s gentleman bourgeois.
The protocol of clothing: hierarchies of appearance

in China
Western representations of Eastern models of clothing, through descriptions furnished by
travellers, also offer an interesting point of departure for probing the function performed
by clothing in Chinese society. Among the first tales in this context are the Jesuit accounts.43
The Portuguese priest Alvaro Semedo, who lived in China for more than twenty years
during the first third of the seventeenth century, dedicated particular attention to Chinese
clothing in The history of the great and renowned monarchy of China.44 According to
Father Semedo’s reconstruction, the Chinese clothing system was formed around the fourth
century CE, and from that time on nothing ever changed:
Two hundred years before Christ they used garments with short sleeves, such as the
Giapponeses use at this day; who are descended of them and still conserve this ancient
habit. This manner of garment continued here untill the raign of Hoan: in the time of
this king, who is much renowned amongst them, (about 400 years after Christ,) that
habit was altered,45 as well in the people, as the Officers, to that fashion which is
41 Dar, Costumes of India, pp. 58–9.

42 Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, pp. 55–6. For living standards in India during the sixteenth century, see
Ashok V. Desai, ‘Population and standards of living in Akbar’s time’, Indian Economic and Social
History Review, 9, 1972, pp. 43–62; Shireen Moosvi, ‘Production, consumption and population in
Akbar’s time’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 10, 1973, pp. 181–95.
43 Adshead, Material culture, pp. 73–4.
44 Alvaro Semedo, The history of that great and renowned monarchy of China, London: John Crook, 1655
(1st edition 1643).
45 See John Vollmer, In the presence of the dragon throne, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1977, p. 21.

j
worn at this day: and is the very same throughout the whole Kingdom, although it
consist of so many and so large Provinces: nor can it be altered (no more than any
other notable custome among them) without the Kings particular Order.46
At the time in which the Portuguese Jesuit wrote, then, Chinese clothing had taken on
the character of a tradition that was more than a thousand years old, not only impermeable
to change but also uniformly spread over the vast territories of the Empire. This estimation
could not but be a contribution, although not necessarily the first or the most influential
one, to the construction of the Western view of oriental society, or at least Chinese society,
as a world where the clothing culture was fossilized.
Semedo then went on to describe the salient points of Chinese dress, stressing its dura-
tion in time and underlining the prescriptive criteria that regulated it:
These fashioned garments have been conserved for so many yeares; and reach from
the neck to the feet, being all open before; These are for their under garments, and
are made for to fit closer to their bodies. Their upper garments are large and wider
in compasse. And because they use no buttons, they lap them before, one side over
another, as our Clergie men doe their Cassocks. Their sleeves are very wide, and the
whole garment without any trimming. . . . This is only to be understood of the Literati,
or learned men, and the people of quality; for the common sort of people are not
suffered to weare it.47
The class distinction was reflected in the materials used to make the various articles of
clothing: ‘For shoes, they know no other materialls but silk of all sorts and colours, for
the rich; and for the poore, cotton . . .. The richer and better sort of the people weare hose
of Damask or Sattin, or any sort of white silk; the rest of white Cotton.’48 The differences
between male and female clothing were not particularly relevant in the eyes of Semedo, with
the exception, obviously, of the custom of bandaging the feet of female infants.49
Father Semedo has been shown to be an attentive observer, for modern studies of the his-
tory of Chinese clothing confirm most of his descriptions. Moreover, notes on the dress
reform introduced in the Han age refer to the codification of the forms of the pao overdress,
a kind of kimono with wide sleeves. This was worn on formal occasions, was considered as
the archetype of Chinese dress, and, as such, was re-proposed by dynasties of Chinese origin
every time there was a need to restore forms of traditional culture in opposition to foreign
domination. This happened, for example, precisely in the period during which Father Semedo
lived in China – that is, in the Ming period, a dynasty that had succeeded the Mongol Yuan
(1278–1368).50 The testimony of Father Semedo may thus be considered trustworthy for
what he directly witnessed, but his judgement as to the immutability of the Chinese dress
code has to be subjected to much more careful screening.
46 Semedo, The history, p. 29.

47 Ibid., p. 29.
48 Ibid., p. 30.
49 Ibid., pp. 30–1.
50 Vollmer, In the presence, pp. 20–1.

j
In China, a person’s lifestyle was a function of social condition: clothing belonged to this
context, and its use was regulated.51 According to John Vollmer, the creation of a clothing
taxonomy associated with social order dated back to the Zhou dynasty (1028–256 BCE),
and it was consolidated under the Han. The fabric, form, and colours of the clothes of
the emperor’s subjects could not be the free choice of the individual; rather, given that
they represented the status, rank, and moral authority of the wearer, they had to be deter-
mined by the state.52 A text from the beginning of the imperial age ruled, in tones similar
to those noted in documents and tracts from early modern Europe: ‘By looking at a man’s
dress it can be seen whether he is noble or humble, and by looking at a man’s flag, his power
can be ascertained.’53 Fabrics and colours, variously combined, made up the map of the
Chinese social hierarchy.
In general, the most precious materials were reserved for the elite, but changes in dynast-
ies brought about the introduction of variations.54 Even though the hierarchy of fabrics and
colours changed with the dynasties, this does not as yet demonstrate the existence of cycles
of fashion. Indeed, the fact that changes in the dress code coincided with dynastic cycles
seems to lead in the opposite direction, or rather to outline a situation in which changes
were regulated by prescriptive principles, and were very slow – if not over a millennium,
at least over several centuries. It is therefore worth focusing attention on the last two imper-
ial dynasties – the Ming (1368–1644) and the Qing (1644–1911) – for which recent studies
are available.
The Ming put an end to the dominion of the Mongol Yuan dynasty and restored imper-
ial Chinese leadership. One of the priorities of the new order was to reinstate the uses and
customs of the most authentic Chinese tradition, corrupted by a century of Mongol domina-
tion, and dress was an integral part of the institutions of Chinese identity. Successive cloth-
ing ordinances were inspired by the models of the most genuinely Chinese periods of the
Han, Tang, and Song dynasties, up to the statutes promulgated in 1587 by Emperor Wanli,
which systematized the matter. These regulations defined the rules for the clothing of the
emperor and his family, as well as the dress for the civil and military bureaucracy and the
nobility. The wardrobe of the emperor was articulated into five categories, for each of
which a precise protocol of use was foreseen: ceremonial dress, leather military dress, nor-
mal military dress, formal dress, and everyday dress. The last was a round-necked yellow
robe with wide sleeves fastened at the wrists, decorated with four medallions – on the chest,
on the back, and on both shoulders – on which golden dragons were embroidered or woven.
The dragon was not a symbol proper to the Ming dynasty, since it was probably introduced
during the Yuan period, but, despite being a legacy of the unpopular Mongols, it became
irreversibly established in the symbolism of Ming power, of which it became one of the
characteristic elements. The voluminous robe of the ordinary everyday imperial dress –
known as the dragon robe – was, in fact, adopted by the Ming rulers, who, in different
51 Valerie Steele and John S. Major, China chic: East meets West, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1999, pp. 15–19.
52 John Vollmer, Chinese costume and accessories 17th–20th century, Paris: AEDTA, 1999, p. 4.
53 T’ung-Tsu Chu, Law and society in traditional China, Paris: Mouton & Co., 1961, p. 135.
54 Ibid., p. 137–9; Vollmer, Chinese costume, p. 6.

j
periods, flaunted from four to twelve medallions showing the mythical beast. Moreover, the
dragon robe became the reference model for defining the dress of nobles and officials.55
What distinguished the dragon robes of members of the imperial family from those of
the elite of the empire were the features of the dragon: the former were recognizable by
the five-clawed dragon (long), a privilege that might also be granted by the emperor to those
whom he considered worthy of such a high honour. Nobles and courtiers were identified by
the four-clawed dragon (mang). In the exercise of their ordinary institutional activities, the
representatives of civil and military bureaucracy wore a type of long, wide tunic of brocade
or damask (pao), which recalled the costume of Chinese tradition. The length of the tunic
and the width of the sleeves were directly proportional to the rank of the functionary
who wore it. The colour, too, could indicate the status of the bureaucrat: those of higher
rank wore red, those of intermediate rank blue, and the lower ranks green.56 From the
end of the fourteenth century, a new taxonomy was introduced to distinguish the grade of
the mandarins: the emblem of rank (pu zi) was a square piece of fabric, generally silk,
and embroidered with the animal that identified the grade, which was applied on the chest
and on the back of the pao. The same number of symbols were assigned to the nine levels of
the bureaucracy and of the military hierarchy. Thus, the mandarins were distinguished by
birds, from the crane of the first level to the quail of the ninth, while military personnel
were recognized by more combative species, from the lion to the rhinoceros.57
A similarly severe regulation defined the character of female dress. The empress’ ward-
robe was divided into ceremonial, formal, and semi-formal clothing. The wives of nobles
and of high functionaries were expected to show the emblems of their rank on the clothes
they wore. The wives of mandarins had the right to the same animal that was embroidered
on their husband’s robes.58
The masses did not have access to precious fabrics and luxurious robes, because of both
their economic conditions and their social limitations; nor, obviously, could they aspire to
the exclusive symbols of rank. The common folk wore simple clothes of hemp or, increas-
ingly in the Ming age, of cotton. The five official colours (yellow, red, black, blue, and
white) were reserved for the upper classes, and therefore the clothing of the people exhibited
a limited chromatic range of shaded hues, with decoration restricted to printed designs.59
In implementing the programme of recovery and reinstatement of Chinese identity
(which drew on the older traditions), the emperors of the Ming period attributed a primary
role to the clothing system, treating it as one of the fundamental elements in the representa-
tion of imperial power. The colours, the pomp, the width, and the symbolism of the robes
were considered a potent means of communicating the cultural, political, and social order
of the empire.
55 Valery M.Garrett, Chinese clothing: an illustrated guide, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1994,
pp. 3–8; Steele and Major, China chic, p. 28.
56 Garrett, Chinese clothing, pp. 9–12.
57 Schuyler Cammann, ‘The development of the mandarin square’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 8,
1944, pp. 71–9; Garrett, Chinese clothing, pp. 14–17; Steele and Major, China chic, pp. 28–9.
59 Ibid., p. 12.

j
The advent of the Qing emperors, who originated in Manchuria, brought a different cul-
ture, harbinger of notable changes in the clothing system of the celestial empire. The Qing
emperors were hardly extraneous to Chinese culture; yet, wishing to safeguard their own
identity and, at the same time, render the unity of the empire more compact, they did not
hesitate to impose their uses and customs on the Chinese. The best-known aspect is perhaps
the obligation to wear the pigtail, but clothing too had to be adapted. In particular, nobles
and mandarins had to adopt the clothing of the new imperial dynasty from the north when
they presented themselves at court or carried out institutional functions, while in private
they were permitted to wear the clothing of Chinese tradition.60
The Qing came from territory beyond the northern border of the empire, where they had
lived amid the typical activity of the nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppes. They were, in
fact, tribes of warriors on horseback, given to hunting and war, who had adopted a lifestyle
in keeping with such occupations. Their clothing was styled to meet the needs of spending
the greater part of the day in the saddle, at the mercy of the elements. The robe worn by
the Manchu was long – although not as long as that of the Chinese – belted tightly at the
waist, and made to adhere to the chest with frogging and toggles, to protect the body
from the cold without impeding movement. The left crossover of the robe, which was closed
by superimposing it on the right side at the neck, was cut on the curve, a legacy of the days
when the horsemen of the steppes made their own clothing from animal skins and not from
the rectangular pieces produced on the loom. Long, tight sleeves and cuffs protected arms
and hands from the wind. The lower part of the robe was split back and front to give
ease of movement for the rider in the saddle.61
The two clothing cultures influenced each other reciprocally. Elements of Manchu cul-
ture came to be part of the clothing system introduced by the Qing: for example, the curved
cut of the flap of the robe, the tight sleeves, and the cuffs. However, the Manchu had come
into contact with Chinese taste, and they promptly adopted the model of the dragon robe,
which they had learned to know through the gifts of Ming emperors. Continuity solutions
introduced by the Qing emperors were clearly perceptible in the decided simplification of
official dress, at least as far as volume goes, which in the later Ming period had become
increasingly conspicuous.62
Harking back to the institutional practice of the Ming, regulations of 1644 and 1759 set
out detailed rules for the clothing of the emperor and his family, the nobles, and the man-
darins. The new classification defined the dress for official and non-official occasions,
which, in turn, were articulated according to the grade of formality. The regulations also
established a new hierarchy of colours. The emperor might wear any colour but yellow
became the colour of imperial power, and was therefore reserved solely for the monarch.
Different shades of yellow identified the members of the sovereign’s family, while nobles
wore blue and brown, and mandarins blue and black. The symbolism remained the same
60 Cammann, ‘The development’, pp. 79–81; Garrett, Chinese clothing, pp. 29–30; Vollmer, Chinese
costume, p. 6; Steele and Major, China chic, p. 29.
61 Cammann, ‘The development’, p. 80; Vollmer, In the presence, p. 22; Vollmer, Chinese costume, p. 6;
Steele and Major, China chic, p. 29.
62 Steele and Major, China chic, p. 29.

j
as at the time of the Ming in terms of clawed dragons. Official female clothing was subject
to the same rules as that for men.63
The emperors of the Qing dynasty kept the existing administrative order, which revolved
around civil bureaucrats and military commanders, divided into a hierarchy of nine levels.
The clothing of public officials was modelled on the scheme created for the imperial family
and the nobles, to which was added specific rules relative to the emblems of grade level,
which had not undergone radical modifications from the codification of the Ming period.64
The meticulous regulation promulgated by the Qing emperors was applied to the cloth-
ing that the nobility and the civil and military officials wore at court, or in the exercise of
their function. The common people were not subject to the severe protocol of imperial
clothing, except for observing the ban on the use of coloured clothing, fabric, and styles
inappropriate to their station. Chinese subjects of the Han ethnic group could wear the
items of clothing inspired by their tradition, a faculty conceded even to mandarins within
the confines of their own homes, even if the influence of the Manchu style contaminated
the cut of the most informal clothes. The little people – craftsmen, country folk, servants,
and labourers in general (coolies) – needed a more practical garb. The whole outfit, made
of blue, cotton cloth, was formed of a short tunic coming to below the waist, and soft trou-
sers. Chinese women wore an ample robe with wide sleeves fastened on the right, combined
with a skirt or, for the unmarried, wide trousers.65
The reconstruction offered here restores the image of a Chinese clothing system con-
structed by a series of rules that drew up, in minute detail and with great precision, the
‘architecture’ of appearance, modelling it on the needs of the protocol representing the ranks
into which the social pyramid of the empire was divided. The meticulous regulations that
dictated the norms for the elite to follow were the instrument by which the emperors aimed
at fixing the correspondence between social condition and status and appearance in dress.
Imperial legislation numbered amongst its provisions some that were intended to discipline
the consumption of the population in general, comparable to European sumptuary laws, but
they were of limited impact, given that the policy of social distinction comprehended in
large part the discipline of the ‘signs’ incorporated in the official clothing, namely the qual-
ity and the colour of the fabric, the number of the four- or five-clawed dragons, and the
hierarchies of birds and animals.66
To answer the question whether such punctilious regulatory construction governed
effective behaviour, there were probably forms of control that partially assured their observ-
ance, but violations of rules were not lacking. Thus, for example, there is frequent testimony
to abuses committed in the use of emblems of rank level. A report submitted to the Ming
emperor in 1488 declared:
During the last hundred past years the civil and military [officials] obeyed the old
laws, and if the insignia of rank were not especially conferred on them, they did not
63 Vollmer, In the presence, pp. 30–45; Garrett, Chinese Clothing, pp. 30–46, 47–61.
64 Cammann, ‘The development’, pp. 79–90; Garrett, Chinese clothing, pp. 62–75.
65 Garrett, Chinese clothing, pp. 76–94; Steele and Major, China chic, p. 31.
66 Craig Clunas, Superfluous things: material culture and social status in early modern China,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, pp. 147–61.

j
dare to usurp them. But [now] the military officials for the most part do not conform
to the old laws, and are continually taking the robes of dukes, marquises, and earls, as
well as those of the first rank.67
The report did not cause immediate reaction but, in 1527, the orders that obliged man-
darins to wear emblems appropriate to their rank were reiterated.68 In the Qing age, infrac-
tions must have been more widespread and more frequent, given that the repetition of
similar provisions became more numerous. In 1748, to remedy the situation and to set in
order and update the code, the emperor Qianlong ordered a revision of the regulations.
This led to an edict under which the order of official clothing was reorganized and, at the
same time, reinforced.69 The abuse of emblems of rank continued, however, to be difficult
to stem, especially in the late eighteenth century, when the practice of the sale of offices was
introduced.70
In the Ming period, there were also many complaints regarding the excess and extravag-
ance in dress that was taking root in various parts of the empire. That Chinese dress taste
was sensitive to the fascination of change was also testified to by Father Semedo at the
end of the Ming period:
The young men weare indifferently all sorts of colours, but the Ancient men do weare
alwaies the most modest. The common people for the most part are cloathed in black;
as all sorts of servants, who are bound not to alter that colour.
Those who are Governours, or have Governed, upon occasion of Feasts, do weare
garments of the finest red. The rich men change their garments at all the 4 seasons of
the year; and the inferior sort, (although poore) twice a year, at winter and summer.71
Even more explicit are the numerous Chinese testimonies to the consumer madness that
infected society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1570, Chen Yao, a stu-
dent preparing for a career as a mandarin, wrote, recalling the once sober costumes, that
‘now the young dandies in the villages say that even silk gauze isn’t good enough and lust
for Suzhou embroideries, Song-style brocades, cloudlike gauzes, and camel serge, clothes
high in price and quite beautiful’. But what strikes Chen most is the rapidity of change:
‘Long skirts and wide collars, broad belts and narrow pleats – they change without warning.
It’s what they call fashion.’72 Frenzy for the new and the taste for change not only led to the
corruption of antique customs but also threatened the social order itself, as a chronicler
from the county of Tongcheng revealed: ‘By the Chongzhen [1628–44] extravagance
became excessive and distinctions were confused.’73
67 Quoted by Cammann, ‘The development’, p. 78.

68 Ibid., p. 79; Garrett, Chinese clothing, p. 10.
69 Vollmer, Chinese costume, p. 7; Garrett, Chinese clothing, pp. 30–1.
70 Cammann, ‘The development’, pp. 86–7; Garrett, Chinese clothing, p. 70.
71 Semedo, The history, p. 29.
72 Quoted by Timothy Brook, The confusion of pleasure: commerce and culture in Ming China, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1998, p. 220. Brook translates with ‘fashion’ the term shiyang, which
literally means ‘the appearance of the moment’.
73 Quoted by Clunas, Superfluous things, p. 155.

j
In effect, there was a real danger that this behaviour would loosen the hold on the social
structure, or at least the forms of representing it. It would enfeeble, or even annul, the iden-
tification of class by clothing, if models of consumption that did not respect the rules filtered
down even among the common people, as more than one contemporary observer noted. An
author who wrote in 1573 revealed in indignation how ‘nowadays the very servant girls
dress qi and luo’.74 Ye Mengzhu, a tract writer from the beginning of the Qing period,
reconstructs the dynamics of the spread of the taste for novelty and the changes that took
place in the Ming age: ‘If we go back to the beginning, it probably started with the gentry
families. Their maidservants and concubines copied their style, then it spread to relatives,
and then it got to the neighbors.’75 This contamination was also encouraged by the circula-
tion of items of clothing, fed by the widespread practice of renting items for particular occa-
sions, or by the equally common habit of pawning clothing from the previous season, which
would then later be redeemed.76 The outbreak of the passion for refinement in dress, com-
bined with the febrile attention to following the rapid changes in taste, was established
among the higher ranks and then contaminated the lower levels, according to the witnesses
noted, who are only a few among the many quoted by recent studies.
This was only one of the expressions of consumer fervour that marked the later Ming
age, which was an era of economic prosperity, sustained by the acceleration of the process
of commercial integration of the various regions of the country, and of China itself within
the world economic circuit.77 This transformation of the Chinese economy, which stimu-
lated demographic growth and urbanization, had the merchants as its primary movers.78
Such a dynamic activated channels for the accumulation and redistribution of wealth, which
(especially in some zones of the country) allowed the better off to enrich themselves further,
and allowed those in more modest circumstances to improve their own tenor of life.79 It is
valid to expect that the increased prosperity of some groups would have opened the doors to
social advancement.80 But it is difficult to evaluate the importance of the phenomenon: all
we can say is that it seems that the improved economic position of some levels of society,
in particular merchants anxious for the social legitimization of their wealth, increased
recourse to emulative consumption of the lifestyles of the elite. The publication of tracts
on elegant life – for example Eight discourses on the art of living by Gao Liang, or the
Treatise on superfluous things by Wen Zhenheng – which guided the newly rich along the
74 Quoted by Clunas, Superfluous things, p. 154.

75 Quoted by Brook, Confusion of pleasure, pp. 221–2.
77 Clunas, Superfluous things, p. 5; Brook, Confusion of pleasure, pp. 10–13, 190–210; S. Dauncey,
‘Illusions of grandeur: perceptions of status and wealth in late-Ming female clothing and ornamentation’,
East Asian Studies, 25–6, 2003, pp. 43–68.
78 Brook, Confusion of pleasure, pp. 210–18.
79 Clunas, Superfluous things, pp. 160–5.
80 Qitao Guo, Ritual opera and mercantile lineage: the Confucian transformation of popular culture in late
imperial Huizhou, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005, pp. 56–74. See also Madeleine Zelin,
The merchants of Zigong: industrial entrepreneurship in early modern China, New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006.

j
paths of good taste, could be attributed to the emergence of such aspirations.81 The picture
of the later Ming period that emerges from all this presents significant analogies to contem-
porary European society, notably the opportunities for increased wealth, the growing pro-
pensity to consume, the transgression of the rules of social hierarchy, the passion for
change, the taste for innovation, and the writing of tracts on behaviour.82
These strong analogies raise the vital question of why it was only in the West that fash-
ion fully became a social institution. According to Adshead, the advent of fashion in Chinese
society was hindered by the marginal role reserved for women. While in Europe it was pre-
cisely the female component that acted as a catalysing force in the dynamics of dress taste, in
China women were inhibited from such action, both because they were obliged to have a
more limited social life than their European counterparts and because their clothing was a
function of the rank of their husbands.83 This interpretation is founded on plausible argu-
ments but may be Eurocentric. If it is true that, in seventeenth-century European society,
the experimentation of fashion as a social institution was in the hands of women, it is
equally true that this was not the only possible solution. In other contexts, the same function
might be entrusted to men.
Other sinologists, including Craig Clunas and Timothy Brook, emphasize instead the
fact that the phenomenon of increasing wealth, harbinger of that emulative competition
in consumption that also involved clothing, only truly affected a very limited portion of
both Chinese society and territory. Therefore, it never reached a scale such as to generate
widespread change. The social hierarchy, and with it the hierarchy of appearance, was
only momentarily shaken, not demolished.84 The changes in the political and social system
brought about by the change from the Ming dynasty to that of the Qing may also have con-
tributed to exhausting the trend taking place during the sixteenth and the seventeenth cen-
turies. The advent of the Manchu emperors reinvigorated the traditional social order
centred on the articulation of the imperial bureaucracy into ranks. In consequence, the
forms of representation of distinction began once again to be identified with the codified
symbolism of imperial regulation, rather than with the mutable criteria of elegance.85
Naturally, the vast Chinese empire did not lack cases that were, at least partially, in
opposition to such a trend. For example, in her recent work on the subject, Antonia Finnane
has analysed the situation in the city of Yangzhou, where there was a lively passion for the
constant renewal of clothing and hairstyles, even during the Qing period.86 However, as Li
Gan, who lived in the second half of the seventeenth century, tells us: ‘In all the Empire, it is
only in the prefectural city and suburbs of Yangzhou that clothes have to follow the
times.’87 Thus, the case of Yangzhou, meaningful as it is, cannot be generalized.
81 Clunas, Superfluous things, pp. 160–5; Brook, Confusion of pleasure, pp. 210–18.
82 Clunas, Superfluous things, pp. 170–2; Dauncey, ‘Illusions of grandeur’.
83 Adshead, Material culture, p. 75.
84 Clunas, Superfluous things, p. 173; Brook, Confusion of pleasure, p. 160.
85 Clunas, Superfluous things, p. 173; Pomeranz, The great divergence, pp. 152–62.
86 Finnane, Changing clothes in China, pp. 52–6. Peter Burke also does not think that the coming
of the Qing produced such a radical change (see Burke, ‘Res et verba’, pp. 151–2).
87 Quoted by Finnane, Changing clothes in China, p. 54.

j
Ultimately, we may perhaps presume that Chinese clothing culture was dominated by
official dress. If the trends of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not persist, this
was in large part due to the fact that Chinese society was a ‘full dress’ one. The object of
competition, and of transgression, was to be able to flaunt clothing with the symbols of
high rank, perhaps those of a higher rank than the role effectively covered, rather than to
demonstrate ‘good taste’ in the choice of dress.
Japanese consumerism
The origins of Japanese clothing culture are linked to the spread of the Chinese taste of the
Tang dynasty (618–907), whose influence was notable in various regions of Eastern Asia.88
It was during the Heian age (785–1185) that an independent Japanese style began to
emerge, progressively less influenced by the models in vogue in China. The sumptuous
and complex dress of the Heian elite met the needs of the representation of power, of the
distinction between various levels of formality, and of class identification, through the
modulation of form and the combination of colours.89 The formal distinctive trait of official
dress of the period was probably constituted by long wide sleeves (hirosode).90
This long period of refined ostentation in clothing style came to an end in the Kamakura
age (1185–1333), when the eminence of the military component in society made principles
of simplicity and modesty prevail. These principles were reflected in clothing, and it was in
this period that the dress destined to be identified with Japanese civilization in the following
centuries emerged. The kosode, literally small sleeves, defined what is today universally
known as the kimono. The advent of the kosode constituted a truly epoch-making change,
in that it established itself as the basic garment for both male and female clothing. From the
sixteenth century on, the evolution in taste and the constant change in style of dress would
be principally expressed through alterations in the fabric and decorative motifs of the
kosode.91
The kosode was made from a single piece of cloth through minimal essential cutting
and stitching. The making of the kosode was cheap, because it exploited pieces of cloth of
a standard dimension, which were cut and sewn in rectangular portions, with no waste
material. The kosode was adapted to the wearer’s body shape through cunning use of
pleats – at times fixed by stitching – or of draping, or of folding on top.92
88 Helen B. Minmich, Japanese costume and the makers of its elegant tradition, Rutland, VT: Tuttle Co.,
1963, pp. 28–9; Sylvie and Dominique Buisson, Kimono: art traditionnel du Japon, Lausanne: Edita,
1983, pp. 20–1; Liza Crihfield Dalby, Kimono: fashioning culture, Seattle, WA: University of
Washington Press, 1993, pp. 25–30.
89 Crihfield Dalby, Kimono, pp. 217–69.
90 Buisson, Kimono, pp. 22–9; Crihfield Dalby, Kimono, pp. 28–32, 217–69.
91 Fumiko Komatsu, L’Évolution du costume au Japon depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à l’époque des Tokugawa,
Paris: Maurice Lavergne, 1942, pp. 107–14; Seiroku Noma, Japanese costume and textile arts, New
York: Weatherill, 1974, pp. 13–36; Minmich, Japanese costume, pp. 30–1; Buisson, Kimono, pp. 31–6;
Crihfield Dalby, Kimono, pp. 34–7.
92 Crihfield Dalby Kimono, pp. 17–21; Susan B. Hanley, Everyday things in pre-modern Japan, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1997, pp. 68–71.

j
The central position of the kosode in Japanese clothing culture, both male or female, was
definitively established in the period of prosperity known as the Momoyama age (1573–
1615). The Japanese craftsmen had learned to make the soft silks once imported from
China, and had developed sophisticated techniques for the dyeing and decoration of fabrics.
The kosode was the textile base on which the technical and creative skills of weavers, dyers,
and embroiderers were exercised, with the aim of satisfying an ever wider and more refined
clientele, which ranged from the merchants to the feudal lords (daimyo).93
This trend was to reach maturity in the Tokugawa age, which opened in 1615 and lasted
for two and a half centuries. This was a long period of internal stability under the rule of the
shogun, when, to prevent the dangers of external interference, contact with the outside
world was progressively reduced, with the exception of limited trading rights conceded to
the Dutch in Nagasaki and the Chinese in selected ports. The stabilization plan also contem-
plated a new social order, based on the intention of making society clearly hierarchical. At
the top were the samurai, followed by the farmers and the craftsmen, and lastly by the mer-
chants. The last two social categories were often linked together under the term chonin
(town-dwellers).94 It was precisely these chonin, and in particular merchants from Kyoto,
Osaka, and Nagasaki, who were the creators and, at the same time, major beneficiaries of
the economic prosperity that Japan enjoyed at the time of the Tokugawa.95 The obligation
for the daimyo and their families to reside at Edo made the new capital an important con-
sumer centre, where craft, commercial, and financial activity rapidly multiplied in order to
satisfy the demand for luxury items, fed by the need to represent status within the Japanese
aristocracy. This situation allowed the more able and enterprising merchants to accumulate
enormous fortunes.96
Peace and stability made the economy, already revitalized in the final two decades of the
sixteenth century, really take off. The wealthy merchants of the age, even though confined
to the bottom level of the formal Tokugawa social hierarchy, found conspicuous consump-
tion to be the means through which they could legitimize the key role that they had taken on
in the economic life of the country. They thus inaugurated frenzied consumer competition
for every kind of good, from furnishings to works of art and, above all, for clothing.97
The writer Ihara Saikaku (1641–93) has left us an extraordinary inside view of the
Japanese merchant class in the Tokugawa period, telling us most effectively of the mood
of the age:
Ancient simplicity has gone. With the growth of pretence the people of today are sat-
isfied with nothing but finery, with nothing but what is beyond their station or purse.
You have only to look at the way our citizens’ wives and daughters dress . . .. But of
93 Minmich, Japanese costume, pp. 31–2; Noma, Japanese costume, pp. 30–5; Buisson, Kimono, pp. 37–9;
Crihfield Dalby, Kimono, pp. 38–9.
94 Donald H. Shively, ‘Sumptuary regulations and status in early Tokugawa Japan’, Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies, 25, 1964–5, pp. 123–64.
95 Alan Kennedy, Costumes japonais, Paris: Adam Biro, 1990, pp. 10–20; Jill Liddell, The story of the
kimono, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1999, pp. 121–7.
96 Burke, ‘Res et verba’, pp. 153–4; David S. Landes, The wealth and poverty of nations: why some are
so rich and some so poor, New York: W. W. Norton, 1998, pp. 365–6.
97 Kennedy, Costumes japonais, pp. 16–25; Burke, ‘Res et verba’, pp. 154–5.

j
recent years, ever since some ingenious Kyoto creatures started the fashion, every vari-
ety of splendid material has been used for men’s and women’s clothes, and the dra-
pers’ sample-books have blossomed in a riot of colours.98
What is most striking in Saikaku’s writing is the clear indication of the advent of a taste
for constant change and novelty:
[In Sakai] a man will keep a striped cloak of homespun silk for thirty-four or thirty-
five years once having to send it to the wash . . .. A mother will give her marriage
trousseau to her daughter’s daughter in a state as good as new, and it will pass on
to her daughter’s daughter . . .. Seven miles from Sakai is Osaka, another world, where
they live for the day and let the morrow care for itself. There it is a rule to be extra-
vagant whenever the chance arises . . .. The women are even more open-handed than
men. Not content with a change of clothes at New Year, Bon, summer, and winter,
they buy new dresses for every occasion which offers an excuse, discard them after
a brief spell of merciless treatment and use the material as scrap for the sewing box.99
The kosode-kimono (henceforth kimono) had definitively become the protagonist of the
consumer culture of the Tokugawa age, the object of desire through which to exhibit wealth
and good taste. The style of the kimono did not undergo radical changes from its consoli-
dated ‘T’ structure, except in the lengthening of the back, which reached the floor, and
the tendency to a widening of the sleeves, which could reach notable extensions. What
did change notably was the width of the sash (obi), which tied the kimono at the waist
and which became progressively more visible, until it became a fundamental complement
to elegant dressing. However, what determined the aesthetic and social value of the kimono
above all was the decorative motif of the fabric from which it was made. The soft silks pro-
duced by the Nishijin craftsmen were the textile base on which expert decorators exercised
their creativity, using sophisticated and laborious dyeing techniques, capable of producing
extraordinary effects that constituted the added value of the kimono.
The fulcrum of the production line for the kimono was the textile warehouse, whose
proprietor, besides dealing with sales, also coordinated the work of weavers, dyers, and
embroiderers.100 Among the outstanding entrepreneurs in the sector was Mitsui Takatoshi,
owner of the most famous shop in Edo; he is considered the inventor of new sales techni-
ques, such as a fixed price, discounts for cash payment, advertising flyers, clothing lent to
theatre actors to publicize the business during shows, and umbrellas with the shop logo
available for clients in case of sudden showers of rain.101 The kimono market became
increasingly large and, at the same time, taste continued to evolve with no continuity. To
deal with the increase in quantity and in the qualitative articulation of the clientele, an
important commercial innovation, that of the catalogue (hi-inagata), was introduced.
98 Ihara Saikaku, The Japanese family storehouse or the millionaires’ gospel modernised, ed. Geoffrey
W. Sargent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959, p. 26.
99 Ibid., p. 98.
100 Minmich, Japanese costume, pp. 195–251; Crihfield Dalby, Kimono, pp. 40–9; Liddell, Story of the
kimono, pp. 136–9.
101 Liddell, Story of the kimono, pp. 136–9.

j
It was a collection of designs for kimonos, printed in black and white on the page by
engraved wooden blocks, on the lines of the technique called ukiyo-e. The images contained
in the catalogue were accompanied by captions that gave details of the colours, of the
decorative materials, and of the type of fabric used. It is difficult to say how effective these
catalogues were in procuring orders. They may have served for the less practical, but more
sophisticated, function of orienting the taste of the client. However, there is no doubt that
these techniques were a refined form of commercial communication.102
Japanese society thus seems to have been pervaded by an inexhaustible desire for new
clothing, decorated with motifs never seen before. Infected by a feverish anxiety for novelty,
which involved members of all social classes, and solicited by the ever more attractive offers
of sellers and by innovative marketing techniques, people let themselves be carried away,
with no regard for the formal distinctions of rank. In a word, they were carried away by
fashion. Where fashion established itself as a social institution, the hold of the traditional
social hierarchy was endangered by the behaviour of those who, in virtue of their prosper-
ous economic circumstances, adopted and exhibited a tenor of life superior to that permitted
to the class to which they belonged. Ishida Baigan, the author of a tract on behaviour in the
first half of the eighteenth century, warned his contemporaries, in tones very similar to those
used in Europe, that
Ostentatious people of the present world not only wear fine clothes themselves, but
dress their maids in clothing made of thin damask and figured satin with embroidery
and appliqué. Someone from the country seeing them would take them for court
nobles or feudal dignitaries, but would wonder why they were not being attended
by samurai followers. Lowly townsmen who are so ostentatious are criminals who
violated moral principles.103
That the advent of fashion was a potential harbinger of the subversion of the social order
was therefore no less clear to the shogun than it was to the sovereigns and aristocracy of
Europe. Shoguns, too, found in sumptuary laws the regulatory instrument through which
to consolidate the traditional order, disciplining the behaviour of consumers.
The first ruling on the question dates back to the mid seventeenth century but it was
from 1683 that a real sumptuary offensive was launched by the shogun Tsunayoshi, who
promulgated no fewer than seven measures aimed at regulating the behaviour of the chonin.
These regulations principally set limits on the consumption and ostentation of sumptuous
clothing by the chonin, indicating the fabrics and the decorations suitable for their status.
They also established the rules to follow for the dress of servants, who (as the passage
quoted above testifies) were not uncommonly also dressed in sumptuous clothing. The legis-
lation further banned using particularly costly materials or fibres in the making of cloth or
kimonos, even forbidding their importation, with limitations applied to the production sec-
tor through inhibiting those techniques of dyeing and decoration held to be excessively lux-
urious. The sanctions promulgated by the bakufu (the shogun’s adminstration) not only
concerned the chonin (although they were the main target) but also other social classes.
102 Minmich, Japanese costume, pp. 203–8; Crihfield Dalby, Kimono, pp. 271–321.
103 Quoted by Shively, ‘Sumptuary regulations’, p. 158.

j
The dress of farmers was subject to much stricter restrictions than those foreseen for mer-
chants, even if the latter were officially considered to be on a lower social scale. The sam-
urai, too, were the object of regulations on their propensity to consume, but in this case
the objective pursued by the shogun was different. The prescription of a sober lifestyle
was the instrument through which to safeguard the status of the samurai, preserving them
from the risk of poverty that they might have run had they accepted the consumer challenge
thrown down by the wealthy chonin, with whom they could not have competed, given the
modest economic condition that most of them enjoyed. The regulation for the luxury avail-
able to the daimyo was quite bland. The concentration of their residence in Edo had, among
other things, precisely the aim of pushing them to focus on fierce competition in conspicu-
ous consumption. In order not to incur sanctions, it was therefore sufficient that they did
not aspire to measure themselves on the same level of luxury as the shogun.104
The doubt that accompanies any analysis of the regulation of luxury is that of effective
application. Conventionally, it is believed that the reiteration of such provisions is proof of
their ineffectiveness. In Japan, the intense regulatory action promoted by the shogun Tsu-
nayoshi raises the suspicion that they failed. This is corroborated, moreover, by some pas-
sages from the text of the laws themselves, in which explicit reference is made to repeated
violations.105 It is true that the literature and memoirs refer to cases in which the glaring
ostentation of luxury on the part of the merchants was punished by the shogun himself,
but it is difficult to ascertain how frequent these exemplary punishments were. Nonetheless,
even crediting the sumptuary laws with effective application, there was no lack of expedi-
ents to get round them. The craftsmen involved in making kimonos were quick to invent
new techniques of dyeing and decoration that substituted those banned by law. Thus, for
example, refined and costly embroidered motifs were substituted by applied motifs, and
the refined effect produced by the laborious dyeing technique called kanoko was imitated
thanks to new, simpler procedures, based on painting with stencils (tayu-kanoko) or on
the use of wax (uchidashi-kanoko).106
It was, however, the regime itself that offered the best chance to elude sumptuary regu-
lations, with the creation of ‘pleasure districts’. The most famous was at Yoshiwara in Edo,
constructed after its predecessor at Nihonbashi had been destroyed in a great fire in 1657.
They were well-defined areas of major cities, in most cases either surrounded by a ditch
or a curtain wall, in which sumptuary laws did not apply. Inside the districts, everyone
could show off their wealth liberally, wearing the most sumptuous of kimonos, with the
exception of the samurai, for whom frequenting such areas was considered discreditable
but who did not hesitate to dissimulate their own social condition in order to accede to
the pleasurable entertainments offered there. Two figures ruled uncontested over these
areas, the epicentre of what the age defined as the ‘floating world’. On the one hand, there
were the beguiling prostitutes, the most famous of whom allowed themselves to be admired
as they processed along the avenues in the shade of the willows (an antique Chinese symbol
for prostitution), showing off the most extraordinary kimonos. On the other hand, there
104 Ibid., pp. 123–58; Minmich, Japanese costume, pp. 209–51.

105 Shively, ‘Sumptuary regulations’, pp.131–5, 155–8.
106 Minmich, Japanese costume, pp. 208–51; Crihfield Dalby, Kimono, pp. 286–7; Liddell, Story of the
kimono, pp. 147–53.

j
were the actors of the kabuki theatre, a form of popular representation that had developed
within the pleasure districts, as an alternative to the classical and exclusive Noh theatre,
which was reserved for the samurai and the daimyo. It was chiefly the former who per-
formed the role of ‘trendsetters’ in fashion, setting off tastes that then created trends.107
The life cycle of Japanese fashion therefore began in the ‘free zones’ of the pleasure dis-
tricts and was principally the work of actors and the more enterprising prostitutes, who had
taken on the role of arbiters of taste. Innovations then spread to the rich chonin and, above
all, to their wives and daughters, particularly sensitive to the fascination of fashion. The
spread of fashion did not, however, terminate in the houses of the merchants but continued
until it reached even the lower classes. The channels by which this ‘trickle-down’ mechanism
operated, as well as the centrality of the ‘female route’ of transmission, are described in a
seventeenth-century text. We read of how the young people of Edo, who went into service
in the residences of the daimyo, showed off during the town ceremonies or festivities, wear-
ing elegant and luxurious kimonos received as gifts from their masters, thereby feeding a
process of emulation that also involved the lower levels of society.108 A source from the
beginning of the seventeenth century indignantly declared: ‘Everyone is wearing gay and
costly brocades, and even servants spend all they have for kimonos.’109 That women and
servants were considered to be among the dangerous promoters of the spread of fashion is
confirmed by the particular attention dedicated to them in sumptuary laws.110
However, the sumptuary laws did not succeed in their intent to limit the propensity to
conspicuous consumption of the emerging chonin class. On the contrary, with the institu-
tion of the ‘pleasure districts’, the authorities offered a way by which the chonin might fully
express their aspirations to social legitimization through ostentation. It is therefore only
apparently paradoxical that the age in which the most massive sumptuary offensive was
concentrated coincided with a period of extraordinary creative flourishing in fashion, the
so-called Genroku era (1688–1704). The kimono reached the height of a true work of art,
involving some of the most celebrated artists of the period.111
The constant search for a decorative motif to astound and the ostentation of the most
unusual combinations of colours, both of which characterized the luxurious fashion of the
Genroku age, started to decline from the first decade of the eighteenth century. The economic
condition of the country had worsened, making a more acute contrast between those who
knew how to profit from the situation, enriching themselves even further, and those who un-
derwent a consistent contraction of their income. The daimyo, unable to give up their lifestyle
for reasons of prestige, became further indebted to the merchants, whose wealth grew. At
the same time, drastically reduced remuneration for the samurai meant that their position
progressively deteriorated, to the point that they were induced to undertake other activities
107 Shively, ‘Sumptuary regulations’, pp. 131–3; Noma, Japanese costume, pp. 37–41; Kennedy, Costumes
japonais, pp. 15–28; Minmich, Japanese costume, p. 199; Crihfield Dalby, Kimono, pp. 274–5; Liddell,
Story of the kimono, pp. 128–36.
108 Minmich, Japanese costume, p. 199.
109 Quoted by Minmich, Japanese costume, p. 191.
110 Shively, ‘Sumptuary regulations’, pp. 123–31.
111 Minmich, Japanese costume, pp. 277–82; Crihfield Dalby, Kimono, pp. 40–51; Burke, ‘Res et verba’,
pp. 154–5.

j
in the most varied sectors. In this context, it was in the interests of the rich chonin to avoid
provoking the resentment of the impoverished samurai. A new taste therefore came into
vogue, oriented towards sobriety and marked by the prevalence of dark colours and more
sophisticated forms of distinction. Iki was the term for the new trend, destined to character-
ize the clothing style of the eighteenth century. As may easily be imagined, the iki taste was
only apparently the vehicle for a greater austerity in dress, since the items of clothing
inspired by the new fashion were no less costly than those of the preceding period. Instead,
this marked the advent of more subtle and refined canons of elegance, recognizable only to
the attentive eye of the knowing observer, the elegant and distinguished tsu of eighteenth-
century Japanese cities.112
The Japanese clothing system had evolved, in the shadow of the ‘isolation’ decreed in the
first third of the seventeenth century, in ways that were completely independent of the condi-
tioning of both Chinese civilization, significant in preceding centuries, and Western society.
With regard to the latter, however, there were astonishingly strong analogies. The aspirations
of merchants to show off their wealth through the luxury of their dress, and the attempts of
nobles to defend themselves against this through sumptuary laws, parallel the phenomena
taking place in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rhetoric of indig-
nant remonstrance on the part of those who, in Japan as in Europe, saw in fashion the primary
cause of the subversion of the social order, was similar. Furthermore, the fundamental role
played by women as protagonists of the fashion scene and the function of servants in activat-
ing the ‘trickling down’ of taste appeared in both Europe and Japan. Finally, the same eight-
eenth-century evolution towards a more sober and refined taste seems once again to invite a
parallel between the trends present in European societies and in those operating in Japan.
Certainly, one might object, there were unforeseen analogies, but also significant differ-
ences. The longue durée of the kimono as the central point of the Japanese clothing system
was a peculiarity that was in decided contrast to changes in European clothing style. The
‘culture of fashion’ in Europe, elaborated through a specialist press, does not seem to have
a correspondence in Japan, despite the early appearance of the printed kimono catalogues.
Finally, though the argument is strictly linked to the preceding one, the ‘status’ of fashion
within society was different. While in Europe the function of fashion had been recognized
and legitimized, in Japanese history fashion had been confined within the pale of the ‘pleasure
districts’ of major cities. In other words, in Japan fashion remained a ‘weak’ social institu-
tion, created in a particular setting: a ‘greenhouse fashion’. It was perhaps due to this ‘weak-
ness’ that Japanese fashion, despite boasting centuries of sophisticated weaving and
decorative techniques, not to mention refined taste, had difficulties in surviving the impact
of Western culture, which flooded into the country in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Western clothing (yofuku, as opposed to wafuku, Japanese dress) progressively con-
quered diverse social groups: first the men and, among these, the bureaucrats, the military,
and the students; then, more slowly, women succumbed, and the kimono became an ethnic
garment, used principally within the confines of one’s home and on ceremonial occasions.113
112 Noma, Japanese costume, pp. 89–93; Crihfield Dalby, Kimono, pp.52–5; Liddell, Story of the kimono,
pp. 166–9.
113 Crihfield Dalby, Kimono, pp. 59–107; Hanley, Everyday things, pp. 166–168.

j
Fashion was not a European invention

The aim of this article was to answer the question ‘Was fashion a European invention?’ In
the light of the elements considered, the response is negative: fashion was not a European
invention. The analysis of the evolution of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese clothing systems
has underlined how these societies underwent phases in which, thanks to propitious eco-
nomic conditions, the accentuated propensity towards consumption stimulated behaviour
that challenged the traditional hierarchies of appearance, usually regulated by canons of a
prescriptive nature. From this emerged a taste for change and an ever more marked desire
for novelty, which created the conditions for the activation of cycles of turnover in clothing
styles. Situations of a similar type, albeit with notable differences from case to case, may be
seen in Mughal India, in the China of the late Ming, and in Tokugawa Japan. The recon-
struction of these experiences has brought to light notable analogies with the European situ-
ation of the same time, especially in the cases of China and Japan. For example, the
increasing passion for change and the insatiable search for novelty; the ‘contagious’ propa-
gation of such behaviour down to the lower ranks of society; and the indignant reactions of
contemporaries, who saw fashion as a means to subvert the social order.
These correspondences have already been highlighted by more than one author, but sig-
nificant differences also emerge and, in the end, prevail. The dynamics of the change that
marked the turnover of fashion in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese societies revolved around
the renewal of the fabrics, the colours, and, above all, the decorative motifs. In contrast, the
cut and the style of the various types of clothing remained substantially unvaried for long
periods, with the kimono as emblematic of this. On the contrary, in Europe between the six-
teenth and the eighteenth centuries, in parallel to the renewal of fabrics, colours, and decor-
ative motifs, the style of clothing, both male and female, was transformed. Consider, for
example, how male clothing changed, passing from the effeminate and pompous French
style of the end of the seventeenth century to the refined but sober taste – ‘in the style of
the young Werther’ – of the final decades of the eighteenth century. Another example is
the transformation that took place in the structure of women’s dresses in the course of a
few decades, from the complex architecture of the hoop petticoat to the simpler chemise à
la reine.
There was a second important difference between European and Asian fashions. In
Mughal India, in late Ming China, and in Tokugawa Japan, fashion was identified in large
measure with luxury, for even the sober kimono in the iki style was extremely expensive,
and the spread of fashion took place in the ‘trickle-down’ mode. In Europe, in contrast,
the evolution in clothing taste was ever more marked by the increasing availability of items
of clothing and ‘trendy’ accessories of contained cost, for example populuxe goods. More-
over, cases of a ‘trickle-up’ contamination were not lacking. In Europe it was possible to fol-
low the trends in vogue at the moment, even if one did not have great means. Therefore, the
influence of fashion extended to a large part of society, contrary to what happened, for
instance, in China, where the phenomenon of consumer anxiety documented during the six-
teenth and the seventeenth centuries affected only a very limited portion of both Chinese
society and territory. As a consequence, it never achieved a scale such as to generate wide-
spread change.

j
This limiting of fashion in Asia contributes to explaining a third element (perhaps the
most important) that clearly distinguishes the role that fashion had assumed in Europe,
in comparison with the great Asian civilizations. In the former, a sophisticated and shared
‘culture of fashion’ was established, which matured both thanks to the attention dedicated
to it by intellectuals and also as a result of the birth and spread of a specialist press. Not
even the Chinese manuals of behaviour or the Japanese kimono catalogues could equal
this culture of fashion, which was the best demonstration of the legitimation of the function
that fashion performed in society. This may therefore explain why the clothing styles estab-
lished in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese society did not become ‘fashions’ in the full sense of
the word, but were progressively relegated to the ethnic environment, or confined to limited
use in the domestic context. Certainly, we do not lack examples of oriental clothing adopted
by Europeans, but we are dealing with forms of expression of snobbery, or particular trends
of Western fashion.
Fashion was not a European invention, but it first fully developed as a social institution
in Europe, while in India, China, and Japan it only evolved partially in pre-modern times,
without being able to obtain full social recognition. In the nineteenth century, there was
no other fashion than that established in Western society, which was then imposed on the
rest of the world, relegating the other clothing traditions to particular niches. This may sig-
nify that fashion contributed to the process of globalization. Certainly it could be numbered
fully among those ‘seeds of civilisation’ that, according to Niall Ferguson, were planted
throughout the world by British domination and that opened the way to ‘modernity’ in
lands beyond the West.114
Carlo Marco Belfanti is Professor of Economic History at the University of Brescia, Italy
114 Niall Ferguson, Empire: how Britain made the modern world, London: Penguin Books, 2004.

Was Fashion A European Invention

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Journal of Global History (2008) 3, pp.

419–443 ª London School of Economics and Political Science 2008

Was fashion a European

Carlo Marco Belfanti

4 Georg Simmel, Die Mode, Berlin: Pan Verlag, 1905.

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Tradition and change in the Indian experience

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21 Goswamy, Indian costumes, p. 1.

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consumer’s choice in clothing at least as strongly as their membership of a particular caste.41

The protocol of clothing: hierarchies of appearance

41 Dar, Costumes of India, pp. 58–9.

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46 Semedo, The history, p. 29.

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67 Quoted by Cammann, ‘The development’, p. 78.

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74 Quoted by Clunas, Superfluous things, p. 154.

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104 Ibid., pp. 123–58; Minmich, Japanese costume, pp. 209–51.

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Fashion was not a European invention

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