In her book Victorian Babylon, Lynda Nead comes up with a striking metaphor for time, comparing it to a crumpled handkerchief.¹ The metaphor suggests that time and history resemble a piece of crushed fabric. Elements of the past repeat in the present and future, the futuristic enfolds the archaic, and dramatic tears erase whole eras.

The idea of time as a crumpled handkerchief offers a welcome alternative to the notion of time as a linear trajectory that is moving in the direction of progress and continuous betterment. Perception of time as linear is one of the legacies of the Enlightenment era which saw history as moving away from ancient barbaric, uncivilised and primitive times towards perfection based on rational thinking and efficiency. Time, according to the ideals of Enlightenment, is not just linear, but also competitive – whereas some are closer to the perceived ideals, others are believed to be losing out, those are the people steeped in timelessness, unaffected by change.

This stereotype has, for centuries, served to justify the existence of colonial regimes the world over. In his seminal article Orientalism that preceded the publication of the eponymous tome, Edward Said writes about how the Orient has been Orientalised within the European literary and political discourses – precisely through its continuous relegation to timelessness:

Rather than listing all the figures of speech associated with the Orient – its strangeness, its exotic sensuosness, etc. – we can generalise about them as they were handed down through the Renaissance. They are all declarative and self-evident; the tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength; they are always symmetrical to, and yet opposed and inferior to, a European equivalent, which is sometimes specified, sometimes not.²

Said’s comment about the perceived timelessness of the Orient is adopted and expanded by Linda Nochlin in her essay The Imaginary Orient, where she discusses how Orientalist art and photography sought to visualise the absence of history and progress in non-Western spaces.³ Thus, The Snake Charmer by the French Orientalist painter Jean-Leon Gerome (used, by the way, as a cover image for the first edition of Said’s Orientalism) shows a crowd of mesmerised Orientals as they watch a naked adolescent snake charmer perform a risky show. The room is poorly lit, and the picturesque blue tiles on the wall are crumbling, as though to further convince the viewer in the ineptness and laziness of the Oriental folk. The scene is timeless, and time seems to be standing still.

According to Said, the Oriental timelessness is continuously portrayed as ‘opposed and inferior’ to the dynamic change in the West. This imagined difference has defined the position that non-Western knowledge and belief systems have occupied in the contexts defined and shaped by Western, post-Enlightenment values. The dichotomy between the West and the rest determines what has historically has been considered art or denounced as artisanship, what has been defined as fashion or dismissed as costume. The former, since the early days of fashion theory, has been defined by change and, hence, believed to be only possible in the changing and dynamic West. And all the East was believed to offer were the unchanging timeless ‘costumes’ and a rich repertoire of exotic styles and motifs for the West to borrow from. The colonial era culminated in a feast of cultural appropriation, from the Japonisme trend to the lavish cultural potpourri of the early-twentieth century designs, to the signature works by Saint Laurent, to the China-themed Met Gala: the list can go on.

Much to the dismay of critics of cultural appropriation and despite the many attempts to eliminate it, cultural borrowings, thefts and appropriations continue. As art historian Min-Ha T. Pham writes in her key piece for The Atlantic from 2014, the discourse on cultural appropriation is unproductive and futile.⁴ Cultural insensitivity occurs, is called out, apologised for, and buried in the annals of the Internet with little to nothing changed in our approach to or understanding of cultural appropriation.

The ongoing unproductive cultural appropriation discourse, argues Pham, only succeeds in solidifying stereotypes about the West as powerful and non-West as weak and open for plundering. As an alternative to it she suggests an inappropriate take on cultural appropriation. Looking at the history of the Indonesian plaid ornament, which continues to be appropriated and ‘elevated’ by Western designers season upon season, she encourages a more thoughtful and nuanced study of design history and design motifs. This can enrich and expand our understanding of non-Western fashion history, help recognise that fashion trends can originate in non-West, and, hopefully, promote more respect for non-Western fashion narratives.

Nead’s concept of history as a crumpled handkerchief might offer a good model for rethinking the hierarchies that still exist in culture and fashion. In my imagination, Nead’s crumpled kerchief is graced with a different ornament than the Indonesian plaid, albeit one with a similarly complex history. This ornament is a mutable motif, and at different times, in different places, it has been known as buta, Indian pine, cone, cucumber, or paisley – and it has also looked differently throughout the centuries. The Western reader would know it by the name of paisley, which evokes associations with contemporary luxury – fashion journalists have continuously referred to paisley as the signature ornament of the Italian house of Etro, and it sits with equal ease on an Hermes scarf, or a Ralph Lauren blouse.

And yet, however effortless and immediate the connection between the ornament and luxury fashion is, paisley’s history, once unfolded, presents a fascinating cloth, partially stained with violence and colonial prejudice. At different times, the ornament signalled affiliation with royalty and working class, evoked male elegance in India and ladylikeness in Europe, fashion and anti-fashion, mass production, artisanship and DIY chic.

The history of the ornament – or at least the history we have access to – dates back to Persia at the times of the Sassanid empire between the 3 – 7th centuries. The butoh pattern of the Sassanian times looked differently from the teardrop-shaped motif we know today, and the word butoh was used to mean a whole group of decorative floral and plant motifs used in architecture.⁵

In the 15th century, the butoh motif was gaining recognition in Northern India as a shawl pattern. The shawls were woven in Kashmir by – predominantly Muslim – weavers from the finest goat-hair fabric, sourced from the northern region of Ladakh. The word ‘shawl’ is derived from the Persian shaal and, in the 15th century, meant a fashionable mantle-like garment draped over the body.

The shawl production flourished under the patronage of the Mughals emperors, who ruled India from the 16th until the 19th century. The empire was established in 1526 by Zahiruddin Babur, a descendant of the legendary conqueror Tamerlan. The Mughal court replicated the organisation and aesthetics of the Persian court, Persia being the cultural trendsetter within the region at the time. One of the traditions the Mughals maintained was khilat, or gift-giving, through which the emperor would manifest his authority over vassals through presenting them with luxurious robes of honour. The Mughal khilat was a sumptuous set of clothes, which would consist of turbans, shawls, trousers, shirts, robes and scarves, all made from finest fabrics and embroidered with gold. The shawls, decorated with embroidered or printed floral motifs, were brought in fashion by the emperor Akbar in the 16th century and constituted the major detail in wardrobes of Mughal nobles. As the miniatures from the 16th and 17th centuries show, the shawls were styled as fitted to the body and were worn by men.

Patrons of art and culture, the Mughal emperors invested heavily into the development of shawl production as well as the patterns that graced them. As noted by Michelle Maskiell, the 17th and the 18th centuries saw the popularity of ornaments conceived specifically to please and honour the Mughal rulers ( the names ‘Shah Pasand’ (Emperor’s Delight), and ‘Buta Muhammad Shah’ (Muhammad Shah’s Flower) are telling).⁶

The buta ornaments constituted a whole wide category of floral motifs. The butoh-buta design was not static and timeless, but was influenced and shaped by the cultural processes happening in India and in the wider region. As John Seyller remarks, the 17th- and 18th-century Mughal art and design were impacted by the gardening culture and artistic exchange with Europe.⁷ At the Mughal court, cultivation of flowers and gardens was seen as a sign of culture, refinement and civilisation. Representations of the floral patterns on shawls celebrated and reflected the prestige of the court-approved art of gardening.

The design and production of shawls throughout the 16th and 17th centuries were highly competitive and dynamic. On a par with the Mughal-sponsored production of shawls in Kashmir, there existed other centres of shawl production across the region, like Kerman, where a different type of fleece was used for the production of shawls and similar floral designs were gracing them. The competitiveness between different artistic and design centres drove excellence and continuous improvements in the techniques of production and ornamentation, employed by the weavers. This dynamic competitive process starkly contrasts with the Orientalist image of the unchanging and timeless field of Indian artisanship, shaped by ancient traditions.

Europe encountered the Kashmiri buta-graced shawls by way of trade with Egypt, Ottoman Empire and Russia. By the middle of the 17th century, the shawls were known in Europe and, by the end of the 18th century, they were recognised as a stylish and highly valuable accessory for women. Then, at the beginning of the 19th century, the shawls, graced with the teardrop-like Indian-pine patterns were embraced in France, where Napoleon’s wife Josephine draped them over column-style, empire-waist gowns, as she is shown in Prud’hon’s portraits.⁸

Since the arrival of the shawls to Europe, they symbolised luxury and status – in Vilette by Charlotte Brontë, an Irish woman passes for ‘an English lady in reduced circumstances’ and is employed as a governess into a respectable household by virtue of owning ‘a real Indian shawl “un veritable Cachemire.”’ Costly and unique, the shawls were re-sold, inherited and sought after – London had a secondary market for the Kashmiri shawls, where high-society women in difficult circumstances could pawn theirs.

All the while, the British government sought to relocate the centre of production of the shawls to Britain, as the high import tariffs on imported luxury goods made the shawl trade senseless. After multiple and largely ineffective attempts to bring Kashmiri goats to Europe, the invention of the jacquard loom proved to be a game changer, leading to the foundation of British centres of shawl production – the most famous of them in the Scottish town of Paisley.

The designs from Paisley were of a lesser quality and much cheaper than the fine Kashmiri shawls, and the ornaments used to decorate them were imitations of the pinecone motifs, which, before getting renamed into paisley, were called, Suchita Choudhury points out, the Cashmere shawl design.⁹

The Scotland-produced shawls happened to become the epicentre of discourses around progress, modernity and class. On the one hand, the ornaments used for the Paisley shawls were decried as tasteless, incongruous and altogether inferior to the ones gracing the original Kashmiri shawls. On the other hand, they were celebrated as a testimony to progress that set Britain apart from the ‘unchanging’ East. Writing for the popular magazine Household Worlds, author Harriet Martineau argued:

If any article of dress could be immutable, it would be the shawl; designed for eternity in the unchanging East; copied from patterns which are the heirloom of a caste, and woven by fatalists, to be worn by adorers of the ancient garment, who resent the idea of the smallest change.¹⁰

The ‘Indian shawl design’ started to gradually go out of fashion in the second half of the 19th century and after the Mutiny in India – the 1857 uprising against the East India Company in India provoked a series of repudiations of the Indian designs, the most passionate one coming from John Ruskin, who denounced ‘the exquisitely fancied involutions’ of Indian design as signs of ‘lower than bestial degradation.’ From the end of the 19th century, the Paisley shawls and their curled ornaments would be relegated to working-class fashions.¹¹

The next major resurfacing of the paisley ornament occurred throughout the 1960s – 70s during the hippie era and symbolised hippies’ attempt to radically divorce themselves from the disappointments of the Western culture. While the summer-of-love era decried racism and ushered in multiculturalism, it reiterated the old Orientalist dichotomies, portraying West as rational and modern and East as spiritual, timeless and mysterious.

Around the same time, a collection of old shawls and a trip to India kickstarted the history of Etro, celebrated for its ingenious interpretations of the paisley pattern and accused – every couple of seasons – for cultural appropriation. Yet, with Etro, the pinecone ornament is yet again firmly established in the vocabulary of global luxury fashion.

The story of the paisley ornament – or would it, in fact, be more accurate to call it the ‘Cashmere shawl ornament’? – is a testament to the non-linearity of history. Its shape and design have been formed by travel, trade, cultural exchange, imperial violence desire for distinction. It has been praised, criticised and forgotten, and at different times, it has channeled different meanings – through its associations with aristocracy and masculinity in India, femininity in the post-French revolution Europe, mass production and working class in the colonial-era Scotland. It is hard to say which of these meanings are truer, purer, or more important – all of them resulted from change in history and cultural exchange. The metaphor of a crumpled handkerchief allows us to admit the complex and illogical developments in history, letting us see fashion and culture in their rich randomness and to seek answers for the future of fashion beyond the great narratives.

Ira Solomatina is a researcher, lecturer and writer whose interest lies in the intersection of globalisation, gender and fashion.

1. L Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000 ↩

2. E Said, ‘Orientalism,’ The Georgia Review, Spring 1977, 31:1, pp. 162-206 ↩

3. L Nochlin, The Imaginary Orient, 1989 ↩

4. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/05/cultural-appropriation-in-fashion-stop-talking-about-it/370826/ ↩

5. S Khazaeimask and S M Hejazi, ‘Plant designs in Sassanid Period mouldings,’ Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège, 2017, p. 696-710  ↩

6. M Maskiell, Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500– 2000, Berg, 2009 ↩

7. J Seyller, A Mughal Code of Connoisseurship, Muqarnas, 2000, Vol 17, pp 177–202 ↩

8. C Zutshi,  ‘“Designed for eternity”: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cultures of Production and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain,’ Journal of British Studies, 48: 2, 2009, pp. 420-440  ↩

9. https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/articles/a-tasteless-history-of-the-paisley-pattern ↩

10. C Zutshi, ‘“Designed for eternity”: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cultures of Production and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain,’ Journal of British Studies, 48: 2, 2009, pp. 420-440 ↩

11. https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/articles/a-long-way-from-home-the-paisley-pattern-and-india ↩

While fashion designers today reach the heights of celebrity status, the roots of the phenomenon lie in fin de siècle intellectual salons in Paris, where fashion first became an autonomous discourse and a vehicle of contemporaneity.¹ As popular haunts for bohemia and artists alike, literary salons favoured the cult of personality and, along with parties, performances and gallery openings provided artists with the opportunity to socialise with peers and potential buyers. Thus, the successful management of public personas became crucial. This new necessity also reflected a shift in the production and dissemination of art. Its creators were increasingly forced to embrace democratisation and to negotiate their position within mass culture. Suspended between pure creativity and commercial demands, fashion assumed centre stage.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, mass consumption and new forms of mediation and promotion meant that authors, artists and designers had to engage with a sophisticated system that on the one hand promoted the cult of the individual, but on the other catered to a broader audience than ever before. As literature scholar Rod Rosenquist points out, the key genres of literary modernism – the Bildungsroman and the autobiography – all suggest a close link between modernism and celebrity culture.²

Paul Poiret was one of the first fashion designers to understand the power of a well-crafted public persona. Patron of the arts, legendary party host, chief promoter of Oriental taste, costume designer, allegedly the first fashion designer to free women of corsetry. He was also the first couturier to create a signature fragrance and venture into furniture design; Poiret owed much of the success of his enterprise to the promotion of himself as a brand.

Not surprisingly, he was also the first fashion designer to write an autobiography. A highly subjective genre, the autobiography allows its author to perform their self on the page by combining history and fantasy. Fashion editor Diana Vreeland called this mix of facts and fiction ‘faction’.³ She herself employed this rhetorical device throughout her life, most notably in her own memoir D.V. (1984), whose title references her flamboyant, adventurous persona as fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue.

Poiret’s autobiography was published in three volumes: En Habillant l’Époque (1930), Revenez-y (1932) and Art et Phynance (1934). Only the first one has been translated into English with the title King of Fashion (1931), which since became Poiret’s nickname in the American press.⁴ The books came out at the time when Poiret – whose fashion house had closed down in 1929 – was a ghost of his former self in the public eye. On the brink of poverty and largely ignored, he was eager to have his voice heard and secure his cultural legacy.

Poiret’s memoir follows the traditional chronological order of autobiographies. As the reader discovers the author’s childhood, it is immediately clear that Poiret’s performance in the text is based on his identification as an artist, rather than a dressmaker:

‘I am told that one of the first words I uttered was: ‘Cron papizi,’ and the initiate understood that this way of asking for a pencil and paper (crayon et papier). Thus, my vocation as a painter revealed itself before my vocation as a dressmaker; but my earliest works were not preserved – they seem to have had no interest or meaning save for myself.’

King of Fashion: The Autobiography of Paul Poiret, by Paul Poiret, 2009

Poiret then proceeds to recall his early sensitivity to colours, exquisite smells and beauty, as if in retrospective he could foresee his career as designer and parfumier. ‘Inspired by the brilliance of flowers,’ he writes ‘I tried to make inks and colours […] Or else I wanted to extract the perfume from the roses, and I confined them in bottles of alcohol and soda water.’ At the age of twelve his vocation as designer manifested itself: ‘Did I already dream of stuffs and chiffons? I think I must have. Women and their toilettes drew me passionately.’ Such descriptions evoke Poiret’s future predilection for Orientalist fantasies and also establish his persona as ‘artist of the cloth’, thus validating fashion as a discipline worthy of intellectual pursuit.⁵ By underlining the inherent importance of the toilette, Poiret also seems to echo Honoré de Balzac’s famous claim ‘La toilette est l’expression de la societé’ (the toilette is the expression of society),⁶ The discourses of fashion and art often overlap as the designer shares anecdotes about his collaborations with Paul Iribe, Georges Lepape, Raoul Dufy and Georges Barbier.

Throughout his memoir, Poiret draws heavily upon the motif of the misunderstood artist. In doing so, he positions himself within the eighteenth and nineteenth century tradition of ‘great men’ whose work was misjudged by the audience.⁷ He addresses this conflict explicitly while discussing the work of painter Raoul Dufy, who designed stationery and textiles for the house of Poiret. However, it is clear that the designer is indirectly talking about himself in the passage:

‘For an artist the useless is more precious than the necessary, and he is made to suffer when people try to make him admit the inanity of his daring, or when only that which is saleable is chosen from his work. An artist has antennæ that vibrate far ahead of ours, and he has presentiments of the future trends of taste long before the vulgar. The public can never say that he is mistaken; it can only express humility, in matters it cannot understand.’

The motif of the misunderstood artist is balanced by another literary topos, that of modesty, which shows the designer’s familiarity with the genre. Yet his desire to establish his cultural legacy surfaces again, accompanied by a critique of the minimalist, streamlined modernism represented in the Thirties by Coco Chanel:

‘People have been good enough to say that I have exercised a powerful influence over my age, and that I have inspired the whole of my generation. I dare not make the pretension that this is true, and I feel, indeed, extremely diffident about it, but yet, if I summon up my memories, I am truly obliged to admit that, when I began to do what I wanted to do in dress-designing, there were absolutely no tints left on the palette of the colourists […] I am truly forced to accord myself the merit of all this, and to recognise also that since I have ceased to stimulate the colours, they have fallen once more into neurasthenic anæmia.’

The designer’s tone and persona convey a sense of nostalgia for a time where his creative output was in tandem with the zeitgeist. His desire to shape Parisian cultural life with his ideas may appear self-aggrandising, but it also reflects the utopian spirit behind the ideal of the total work of art. He writes, ‘I dreamed of creating in France a movement of ideas that should be capable of propagating a new mode in decoration and furnishing.’ An admirer of the Wiener Werkstätte, Poiret did believe in shaping everyday life as aesthetic experience through clothing, craft and art.

Poiret’s articulated performance of the self in King of Fashion offers multiple readings. It is first and foremost an attempt to articulate his cultural legacy and situate himself in history. It also parallels the modern conflict between art and commerce perceived by many designers and artist, a condition enabled by the increased privatisation of the practice and experience of art. But the significance of the text today, at a time when fashion seems consumed by an obsession with heritage and branding,⁸ is that it provides a privileged, nuanced perspective into the origins of contemporary celebrity culture.

Alex Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. N. Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003. ↩

2. R. Rosenquist. ‘Modernism, Celebrity and the Public Personality’, Literature Compass, Volume 10, Issue 5, 2013, pp. 437-448. ↩

3. Quoted in Lisa Immondino Vreeland’s documentary The Eye Has To Travel, 2011 ↩

4. P. Poiret, King of Fashion: The Autobiography of Paul Poiret, V&A Publishing, London, 2009, p. 153. ↩

5. C. Breward, Fashion, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2003, p. 103. ↩

6. quoted in V. Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, Berg, Oxford and New York, 1988. ↩

7. T.B. Porterfield and S.L. Siegfried, Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres, and David, Pennsylvania State University Press, Philadelphia, 2006. ↩

8. Paul Poiret’s global trademark rights and archives were recently sold to Shingsegae International, already a partner of Céline and Givenchy among others. This is one of the many recent attempts to resurrect historical fashion houses. See http://fashionista.com/2015/08/paul-poiret-resurrection. ↩

When high fashion borrows from the Orient, it often engages in acts of reversal where, put simply, the bared and displayed body becomes covered and concealed. The ‘orientalised’ body whether it is seen as exotically fascinating, stereotyped as an ethnocentric myth of an all-encompassing East, or displayed as inferior in relation to Occidental ways of doings, releases a sense of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’. Embedded in Orientalism, according to literary theorist Edward Saïd, are romanticised and simplified images, Western imperialist misrepresentations, of Asia and the Middle East. These often rest on Western domineering self-affirmation where the Orient ‘has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea personality, experience.’²

Orientalism in fashion straddles dichotomies of the covered and uncovered – and often stands at the crossroad of Western often skin-exposing fashion and traditional dress practices associated with modesty. What cultural theorist Stuart Hall calls ‘the spectacle of the “Other”‘³ refers to how representations of difference, here an ‘orientalised’ body, are stereotyped in the media. Hall charts how ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ are approached through, among others, anthropological and psychoanalytical theories. The anthropological approach to understanding things is through giving them different positions of social classification. Classifying things, or organising them into binary oppositions, are significant acts of attributing meaning to them, such as the West and the East, culture and nature, good and bad. This also provides symbolic boundaries between things, which help one to understand their differences. Psychoanalysis has approached the concept of the other through the argument that ‘the “Other” is fundamental to the constitution of the self.’⁴ The idea is that one gains a concept of self, self-definition, through difference from others. Designers, consumers and the media often set up what Hall calls a ‘symbolic frontier between (…) “insiders” and “outsiders”, Us and Them.’⁵

These binary, often stereotyped, tensions remind us of the body’s unruly ammunition. While to uphold a distinction between the West and the East, inside and outside, us and them, is anachronistic, as global fashion moves freely across the world from the East to the West and vice versa, there is something interesting to be found in the brackish water of the melange. It is here we find the complexities of modesty and immodesty as well as concealment and exhibition played out. The idea that the undressed body somehow corrupts moral standard runs like a paradoxical vein throughout Western culture, as precisely the undressed body, or rather parades of fashionable flesh, is also endlessly exploited for its shock value. Nudity is everywhere both wicked and common. Not just Terry Richardson’s Gonzo-style photography and Vogue Paris’ porno chic pages, but also in wider culture we are bombarded with untiring images of exposed bodies that sell.

Exploring both the material and cultural functions of fashion, scholars have been preoccupied with these across practical functions, aesthetic or even moral qualities of clothes often arguing that the reasons why people wear clothes are based on protection, attraction, communication and modesty. Psycholoanalyst John Carl Flügel⁶ sought to understand fashion as a pendulum moving between modesty and eroticism with sex being repressed in civilised cultures. But what is deemed shameful and indecent by some cultures might be displayed with pride in others. The degree as to which the body and clothing are shamed is culture specific. Intrinsic to the work of many fashion scholars, and indeed to dress cultures, is how the body, as the structure of fashion, is civilised and cultured through adornment. Flesh on its own is simply less loaded.

There are numerous examples of this dialogue within high fashion, and often designers appropriate Orientalism as a potpourri of Otherness. Riccardo Tisci with his autumn/winter 2009 haute couture collection for Givenchy visited Berber tribes with drop-crotch trousers (which have been embraced by a variety of designers for many seasons), full-length skirts, hooded veils, draped transparency and jewelled headpieces. This was an aestheticised and romanticised take on Berber dress, adorning the Western body in connotations of ethnicity rather than releasing fashion’s omnipresent paradoxes of shame and shamelessness.

Different is Hussein Chalayan’s spring/summer 1998 ‘Between’ collection. Evoking Daniel Rabel’s enigmatic seventeenth-century painting ‘Première Entrée des Fantômes’ with four spectres clad in head-to-toe black cloth, Between casts a shadow of phantoms of extreme beauty on the screen of fashion. The finale of Chalayan’s show saw six models wearing black chadors of different lengths, from naked to totally covered – all of them with their faces covered. Like ‘nudes… wearing ghosts of absent clothes’⁷ the show can be seen as both spectacle and spectre, throwing up a range of complex issues around shameful eroticism, modesty dress and cultural identity.

The practices of veiling have a long and complex history throughout the Arab world, and whereas countries like Turkey have banned the veil, it has enjoyed a revival from the 1970s amongst Egyptian women as part of a wider Islamic movement.⁸ But covering is, of course, not a practice confined to Muslim modesty (as Reina Lewis argues elsewhere in this issue). Throughout the history of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ dress practices, the distinction between dressed and undressed has been carefully guarded, and by now the exhaustive flaunting of flesh has somehow desexualised, overexploited and clichéd the body. Yet, it seems nudity triggers a certain consuming gaze, as the most private is made available to scrutinise without shame. According to Anne Hollander the nude in art was invented to both legitimise and idealise the otherwise profane nakedness.⁹ While Chalayan’s models are fashioned and idealised, and thus not naked, their nudity is uneasy precisely because they are also veiled – a dress practice widely associated with modesty. The juxtaposition of nudity and the veil is loaded with shock value and notions of sacrilege.

Across cultures we learn from a young age what parts of the body are shameful, and the genitals are certainly one of them. The Fall of Man, with Adam and Eve and the fig leaves, is one of the first examples to connect bodily exposure, more specifically the genitals, with shame and profanity. Vivienne Westwood explored the potency of this part of the body in 1989 with her fig leaf tights which instead of covering the genital area shamelessly drew attention to it. Chalayan’s veils of varying lengths similarly charge the sense of nakedness further and capitalise on its shock value.

Growing up in Cyprus, on the colliding frontier between the Muslim and the Christian world, implicit in Chalayan’s wider work is an anthological inquiry into cultural difference and identity, exploring cultural exiles, people without identity in shadowing no man’s land, inhabiting some sort of cultural transit in the interface of high technology and local ethnicity. The religious motif of ‘Between’ was a continuation of his previous collection ‘Scent of Tempests’ (autumn/winter 1997) which was an attempt to create attire for worship as Chalayan found it curious that ‘people who worship pray for bad things not to happen.’¹⁰ Further to Between’s obvious religious connotations, its transgressive power lies in questioning the issues of bodily identity, quite literally with ‘faceless’ models. Chalayan was exploring how through ‘the religious code you are depersonalised’,¹¹ and in doing so making yet another curious link between fashion, religion and identity. Chalayan is not singular in denying his models faces – Maison Martin Margiela has also utilised this to lengths. Surrealist photographers, like Man Ray and Blumenfeld, also embraced Freud’s theories and used masks to play with hidden, dreamlike identities. Chalayan’s collection not only comments on the seemingly replica identity of models, reducing them to mere unidentifiable, depersonalised bodies rendered by the veil, it also casts light on fashion’s aggressive exposure of flesh and its worship of identity.

Chalayan’s ‘Between’ elicits questions about cultural melange and the exposure of seemingly binary dress practices where the body is equally, if not shamed, then exposed as an ideological site of identities in motion. As such, the collection treads a loaded territory of the veiled, faceless, unidentified women and their exposed bodies. It renders visible both Western and Eastern approaches to the body and in doing so mirrors the other, becoming the spectacle of the Other. The concealed becomes the shadow side of the exposed, and vice versa, and herein lies the dynamics of the collection, exaggerating two inextricably linked approaches to the body – exposure and concealment – which is the core dynamics of fashion.

Another bodily representation of otherness is present in Comme des Garçons’ spring/summer 1997 ‘Dress Becomes Body, Body Becomes Dress’ collection where tight-fitted, transparent dresses with asymmetrical ‘tumour piece’¹² padding made for unorthodox, almost alien bodies. Across dress and fashion history there are various examples of bodily alterations and augmentations, such as foot binding, cod pieces, neck rings, corsets and crinolines. Protruding stomachs seem particularly peculiar to contemporaneous eyes – such as the male peascod bellies of the sixteenth century – most famously represented by Jan Van Eyck’s 1434 painting of the Arnolfinis. A normative fashioned body streamlined in proportion is absent, and ‘Dress Becomes Body, Body Becomes Dress’ instead gives way to a transformed, almost pathological body, evoking the shamed hunchback and the leper wrapped in fabric. While this grotesque body may be uneasy, it is, as fashion curator Harold Koda notes, ‘nowhere near the exaggerated scale of the panniered gowns that were in vogue in the eighteenth century.’¹³ Kawakubo’s Japanese background affects her sense of aesthetics and also the way she approaches the body. In traditional Japanese society, sexuality is never revealed explicitly,¹⁴ and Kawakubo argues that her take on the body is ‘different from the pleasure Western women take in showing the shapes of their bodies. It bothers Japanese women… to reveal their bodies’.¹⁵ Indeed, the underlying body in her wider work is different, and more enigmatic, to the exposed and sexualised body so often present in ‘traditional’ Western fashion. Instead the collection’s morphed, disproportioned form seems a carnivalesque, if not shameless, suggestion of a different body.

Shame is the shadow of fashion. Bodies and aesthetics not immediately performing to the ideal template of the time are so often consumed by a fashion system that instead internalises and reworks them into shameless reversals. Big bellies, disproportioned hips and, of course, exposure of pubic hair are but a few features considered disgraceful – albeit they are part of the very human body. Perhaps it is when fashion casts light on what is deemed human flaws, the imperfect, that we understand that ‘bodies are potentially disruptive’.¹⁶ The work of Chalayan and Kawakubo provide us with a symbolically different perspective through which we fundamentally understand both our own body and the system of fashion. It is through such work that we come to understand fashion’s ability to make visible and capitalise on complex cultural values.

Dr Ane Lynge-Jorlén is an independent Copenhagen-based fashion reseacher and curator, and a former editor of Vestoj.

Emma Löfström is a Stockholm-based artist and illustrator.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Fashion and Shame.

1. ‘Orientalism.’ The Berg Fashion Library, (n.d.). (accessed 13 Nov. 2011 ↩

2. E Saïd, Orientalism. Vintage Books, New York, 1978. pp. 1-2. ↩

3. S Hall (ed), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Sage, London, 1997, p. 225. ↩

4. 4. Ibid. p. 237. ↩

5. Ibid. p. 258. ↩

6. J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes, AMS Press, New York, 1976. ↩

7. A Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, Viking, New York, 1978, p. 86. ↩

8. F El Guindi, “Veiling Resistance”, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 3 (1). 1999, pp. 51–80. ↩

9. A Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, Viking, New York, 1978. ↩

10. P Golbin, ‘A Synoptic Guide to Hussein Chalayan’s Mainline Collections 1993-2011’, Hussein Chalayan, Rizzoli, New York, 2011, p. 271. ↩

11. Ibid. ↩

12. P Golbin, ‘A Synoptic Guide to Hussein Chalayan’s Mainline Collections 1993-2011’, Hussein Chalayan, Rizzoli, New York, 2011, p. 271. ↩

13. Ibid. ↩

14. C Evans, ‘Paris 1996’, 032C, issue 4, 2002/2003, pp. 82-83. ↩

15. H Koda, Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001, p. 113. ↩

16. J Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000, p. 8. ↩

The fine line between beauty ideals and so-called ‘freak’ bodies is epitomised in the largely-forgotten freak show performer called the Circassian Beauty, who moved from a cultural trope used to sell cosmetics in the eighteenth century, to a sideshow act created by circus impresario PT Barnum in 1864. Theorist Robert Bodgan, in his seminal social history of the freak show, categorises the Circassian Beauty, along with sword-swallowers, snake-charmers and tattooed people as exotic self-made freaks – performers with fabricated stories that reflected the cultural concerns of the day.³ As current concerns about representations of disability are played out in American Horror Story, themes such as slavery and Orientalised eroticism were played out through the commodified body of the nineteenth century Circassian Beauty.

The image of the Circassian woman as a beauty ideal was developed by the racial taxonomies of physician and naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Based on his research into skull shapes for his 1775 book On the Natural Variety of Mankind, he determined that all humans originated from the Caucasus region, and the women of Circassia were deemed the ‘purest’ and most beautiful in the world. Before long, the expanding cosmetics industry hijacked the Circassian ideal – with her dark lustrous hair, pale skin and rosy cheeks as a marketing ploy. George Crabbe, in his 1785 satire on journalism The Newspaper, illustrated this:

– Come, faded belles, who would your youth renew,
And learn the wonders of Olympian dew;
Restore the roses that begin to faint,
Nor think celestial washes vulgar paint;
Your former features, airs, and arts assume,

Circassian virtues, with Circassian bloom.⁴

This plays on the product ‘Bloom of Circassia,’ a blusher that was advertised as providing the wearer with a long lasting ‘lively and animated bloom of the rural beauty’.⁵

The legendary beauty of Circassian women, became a key discourse during the Crimean War, when France, Britain and Sardinia supported the Ottoman Empire against the advances of Russia. The Illustrated London News wrote of the supremacy of the Circassian people in 1854, the year that Britain joined the conflict;

‘They are manifestly the true aristocrats of nature… Of the female type among the Circassians our Engravings furnish two or three specimens. The beauty of these women is, of course, well known – their too common destination is not worthy of this gallant and superior people.’⁶

Quote from the Illustrated London News, June 3, 1884. 

The ‘too common destination’ referenced here refers to the Sultan’s harem where Circassian women were said to be especially prized for their beauty.

The notion of the harem has long been a site of Western Orientalist fantasy, epitomised by artists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres who depicted it as an erotically-charged space, often laden with sapphic overtones. Circassian slaves in the Sultan’s harem also featured in Byron’s satirical epic poem Don Juan that he was still composing at the time of his death in 1824. The politics of the harem, however, operated with different conceptions of slavery to the transatlantic slave trade that Britain had outlawed in 1833. Governed by the laws of Islam, the harem slave system allowed both slaves and concubines certain rights, as well as opportunities for manumission, and was viewed as ‘consensual and a recognisable route to [social] advantage’.⁷ Western notions of slavery have been highly racialised, and the concept of white slavery was problematic in European and American minds.⁸

Despite these fears, slaves sold into harem life became an aspect of Western tourism when visiting Constantinople. The slave market became a key destination for tourists before it closed in 1847, and the wives of European ambassadors were often taken on harem tours where viewing slaves girls was part and parcel of the exotic display.⁹ The illicit thrill of the harem was as much a part of the spectacle for Western visitors in Victorian Constantinople as it would become in the freak shows of America, and combined the supposed despotism of the Ottoman Empire with the Orientalised sensual allure of the harem.

The Crimean War had shone a spotlight onto the beautiful Circassian slave in the Ottoman harem, and a decade later America found itself in the midst of a Civil War dominated by ideologies of enslavement and freedom. It was at this point that showman and future circus impresario PT Barnum stepped in, ever keen to capitalise on exotic tales of savagery and captivity, using the harem as the epitome of the Orientalist fantasy. From Barnum’s correspondence it becomes clear that accepted ideas about the Circassian ‘beautiful white slave girl’ were paramount in his decision to add them to his roster. He wrote in a letter to his procurer;

‘I still have faith in a beautiful Circassian girl if you can get one very beautiful […] or if you can hire one or two at reasonable prices, do so if you think they are pretty and will pass for Circassian slaves […] If you don’t find one that is beautiful & possesses a striking kind of beauty, why of course she won’t draw and you must give it up as a bad job.’¹⁰

With Barnum re-casting the Circassian Beauty for an American audience he was playing into contemporary debates that raged around freedom and slavery. His first Circassian Beauty, Zalumma Agra ‘the star of the east’, went on display in 1864 – during the Civil War – and became the prototype for an act that remained a feature of the sideshow for nearly fifty years.¹¹

Barnum circulated a story that he sent one of his employees to find a Circassian slave for him to put on display, who only succeeded by disguising himself in Turkish garb and buying ‘Zalumma’ from the slave market, in order to save her from life in the harem. While this story suited the needs of Barnum as the consummate showman, a more realistic version is that a local girl with bushy hair came to the museum looking for work, and she subsequently became the first Circassian Beauty performer.¹²

The tightly-curled hair of Barnum’s Circassian Beauty became a key attribute in the replica acts that followed. While the original reasons for the hair are unknown – and could have simply been a natural feature of the first performer – it’s difficult not to read it as the feature that turns the sideshow Circassian Beauty into a uniquely American character. The tight curls resembling Afro-textured hair, later achieved by soaking the hair in beer and teasing it into shape,¹³ were not reminiscent of either Circassian women or representations of the harem. Literary and Cultural scholar Linda Frost noted that the hair mimics so-called ‘primitive’ sideshow exhibits such as the Fiji Cannibals, and has also highlighted the mythic stereotype of the promiscuous sexuality of African-American women that was circulating in America at this time.¹⁴ Re-cast with Afro-textured hair, the Circassian Beauty represented white anxiety about miscegenation at a time when Civil War raged in an attempt to end slavery, adding a new layer of exoticised sexuality to a figure who now not only represented the Orientalised bondage of the harem, but also the ravenous sexual appetite of the African-American woman. For Barnum, there can be no doubt that sex and slavery sold well.

The Circassian Beauty was constructed by Barnum as an embodiment of the seductive qualities of the harem, and as such her garments was paramount. She wore baggy Turkish-style trousers with revealing flowing garments, ornate capes and ‘star of the East’ motifs.¹⁵ A popular prop on stage was a water pipe, and Robert Bogdan noted that a Turkish resident in New York was consulted over the initial Circassian Beauty’s dress and name.¹⁶ Sideshow postcards emphasised the exotic and erotic qualities of the performers, and studio shots accordingly featured items such as animal skins or palm leaves.¹⁷ Through the combination of her dress and hair, Barnum’s Circassian Beauty embodied a host of conflicting cultural signifiers, including, as Frost has pointed out, ‘notions of Colonial ambition and Orientalism, the superiority of the United States and Manifest Destiny, the position of women within Victorian America and the cult of True Womanhood, the purity of the white race and the sexualisation of the African-American woman’.¹⁸

Cultural studies scholar Niall Richardson writes that the ‘freak’ is a cultural construct.¹⁹ As such it’s understandable that the Circassian Beauty as a freak show staple died out by 1910,²⁰ as the harem slave trade had come to an end, leaving the character of the Circassian girl rescued from the Sultan’s harem somewhat redundant. However, the harem itself was ripe for revival in European Orientalist fantasy, and concurrent with the demise of the self-made Circassian Beauty in the American freak show was the rise of the harem in another form of entertainment – the opulent productions of the Ballets Russes and the spectacular fashions of Paul Poiret. Ballets Russes costume designer Leon Bakst created his first pieces for Cleopatra in 1909, followed by the success of Scheherazade in 1910, directly inspired by the Arabian Nights.

The Circassian woman went from a beauty ideal and advertising trope to an embodiment of racial fears surrounding slavery and a sideshow exhibit in a little under a century. The display of ‘raced’ bodies, contextualised within the history of freak shows, remains contentious from theatre to art exhibits and celebrity culture. Depictions of disability – frequently at the heart of the freak show – are again a subject of debate through American Horror Story, which in its carefully constructed colour palette and stylistic choices once again blurs the boundaries between fashion and ‘freak’, and questions our cultural ideals of the body beautiful.

Amber Butchart is a fashion historian and an Associate Lecturer at London College of Fashion. 

1. See N Richardson, Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Surrey, 2010 ↩

2.  For more on these arguments, see Emily Nussbaum’s piece ‘The New Abnormal’ in the New Yorker, December 8th 2014 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/08/new-abnormal ↩

3. R Bodgan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990, p. 235 ↩

4. As cited in J Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 110 ↩

5. Ibid, p. 208 ↩

6. Illustrated London News, June 3 1854, p533-534 ↩

7. R Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem, IB Tauris, London, 2004, p. 130 ↩

8. Lewis (2004), p. 131-132 ↩

9. Lewis (2004), pp132-133 ↩

10. Cited in L Frost, ‘The Circassian Beauty and the Circassian Slave: Gender, Imperialism and American Popular Entertainment’ in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, R Garland Thomson (Ed.), NYU Press, New York, 1996, p. 248-249 ↩

11. This was an especially relevant year as the Russian conquest of the Caucasus was complete by 1864, leading to forced mass exile of the indigenous Circassian people, and sounding the death knell for the concept of the Circassian Beauty as a symbol of the white slave trade. This compulsory movement of peoples has been retrospectively labelled by some as genocide and ethnic cleansing. For more see W Richmond, The Circassian Genocide, Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, 2013 and R Does ‘The Ethnic-Political Arrangement of the Peoples of the Caucasus’ in F Companjen, L Károly Marácz and L Versteegh (Ed.), Exploring the Caucasus in the 21st Century: Essays on Culture, History and Politics in a Dynamic Context, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2010. ↩

12. Bogdan (1990), drawing on an unpublished account of a contemporary of Barnum’s, p238 ↩

13. Ibid p257 ↩

14. Frost (1996) p259 ↩

15. Frost (1996) p257, Bogdan (1990) p238 ↩

16. Bogdan (1990), p235, 238 ↩

17. Frost (1996) p257 ↩

18. Ibid p250 ↩

19. Richardson (2010) p5 ↩

20. Bodgan (1990) p240 ↩