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Dress, Fashion and Technology: From Prehistory to the Present
Technology has been an essential factor in the production of dress and the cultures of fashion throughout human history. Structured chronologically from pre-history to the present day, this is the first broad study of the complex relationship between dress and technology.
Over the course of human history, dress-making and fashion technology has changed beyond recognition: from needles and human hands in the ancient world to complex 20th century textile production machines, it has now come to include the technologies that influence dress styles and the fashion industry, such as the media and printing presses.
In the last century, new technologies have helped not just to produce but to define fashion: the creation of automobiles prompted a decline in long skirts for women while the beginnings of space travel caused people to radically rethink the function of dress. In many ways, technology has itself created avant garde and contemporary fashions.
Through an impressive range of international case studies, the book challenges the perception that fashion is unique to western dress and outlines the many ways in which dress and technology intersect. Dress, Fashion and Technology is ideal reading for students and scholars of fashion studies, textile history, anthropology and cultural studies.
Over the course of human history, dress-making and fashion technology has changed beyond recognition: from needles and human hands in the ancient world to complex 20th century textile production machines, it has now come to include the technologies that influence dress styles and the fashion industry, such as the media and printing presses.
In the last century, new technologies have helped not just to produce but to define fashion: the creation of automobiles prompted a decline in long skirts for women while the beginnings of space travel caused people to radically rethink the function of dress. In many ways, technology has itself created avant garde and contemporary fashions.
Through an impressive range of international case studies, the book challenges the perception that fashion is unique to western dress and outlines the many ways in which dress and technology intersect. Dress, Fashion and Technology is ideal reading for students and scholars of fashion studies, textile history, anthropology and cultural studies.
- GenresFashionAnthropology
264 pages, Paperback
First published May 7, 2015
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November 21, 2019
3 – Technologies and Dress in Towns, Cities, and Empires (Neolithic Period to c. 500 CE)
p.33 – Silk appears c.4900 BCE and the Chinese appear to have maintained a monopoly on the production of cultivated silk for at least 2,500 years.
Authorities generally agree that cotton was first cultivated on the Indian subcontinent at some time in the third millennium BCE. And much at the same period of time, it appears to have come into use for textiles in South America. The species native to India is not the same as that in South America, indicating that cotton was an independent development in each area.
p.35 – We know that although wool was worn, linen was the major fiber used for Egyptian dress.
p.39 – The silk of China and cotton of India were unique and highly desirable textiles that were pivotal in establishing trade with other regions. But long before the trade routes carried silk to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the aforementioned durable kinds of materials used for additional elements of dress had been moving around the world. Trade between the Far East and Europe in the period from the second century BCE to about the fourteenth century CE utilized the so-called Silk Road. Even though wild silk was apparently used in the Indus Valley and on the Greek Island of Cos, these fabrics did not compare with the luxurious silk fabrics that gave China a product with no parallel in the Middle East and the West. The Chinese closely guarded their secrets of sericulture and the technological skill needed for its creation.
p.48 – The tunic and toga would not have required innovative technologies for their production, but would have relied on well-established weaving processes that may have been adopted from earlier civilizations. The fibers available to the Romans were linen, wool, hemp, cotton, and silk, the latter two being luxuries and more likely used for women’s dress than for men’s, as silk fabrics were viewed by some influential leaders as effeminate. Cotton was imported from India and silk made its way across the trade routes from China.
4 – Technology and Dress Facilitate Fashion Change (Early Medieval Period to the 17th Century)
p.53 – As the northern Germanic tribes had gained more influence, clothing styles had altered. Tribesmen wore stockings, trousers, and boots. Clothing for both men and women was made from cut sections of fabrics sewn together rather than being draped from lengths of fabric.
The fibers that they could use were linen and wool, produced in Europe, and the imported luxury fabrics, cotton and silk. European silk and cotton production began gradually, and by the twelfth century these fabrics were also being produced in Europe.
By the twelfth century, Italian craftsmen were skilled in making both cotton and silk fabrics. The tools that they used were most likely variations of tools used in India, in China, and/or in the Middle East, that had travelled westward as fabric forming technology had advanced.
p.61 – The Chinese had been making paper since the first century CE. Printing came later. The earliest Chinese block printed book is dated at CE 868 and moveable type is thought to have been used beginning around CE 1041 to 1048. Block printing had been used to print fabrics in Europe as early as the thirteenth century. Block printed books became available in the early 1400s.
5 – Asian Developments in Technology, Dress, and Fashion (Neolithic Period Until the 17th Century)
p.71 – For many centuries, China and India had a virtual monopoly on the cultivation and production of two important textile fibers: silk and cotton. Not only did they supply these textile fibers and fabrics to the rest of Eurasia, but over time and with trade, the technologies they developed also made important contributions to textile manufacture in other parts of the world.
p.72 – Nineteenth-century German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen named these routes “the Silk Road” after silk fabrics, one of the most important items of trade. Much of this silk was travelling west.
p.73 – The technologies required to transform textile fibers into textile fabrics can be divided into those used for preparation of the fiber, spinning the fibers into yarns, uniting the yarns into a fabric structure, and providing special characteristics to the fabric through processes called finishes.
p.74 – Desire for silk outside of China was a major impetus to the development of world trade.
p.75 – Another Chinese invention was the collapsible umbrella that protected against both rain and sun (made of oiled paper from mulberry bark), an innovation of the Wei Dynasty (CE 386-535).
p.77 – Colors were obtained from plants that included a local Chinese indigo for blue, madder for red, gardenia for yellow, acorns for black, and gromwell, a plant that produces a purple dye. The foreign textiles that arrived in China often influenced the design of Chinese textiles.
p.78 – Indian technology was responsible for excellence in dying and weaving that created beautifully patterned cloth.
p.80 – Christopher Columbus sailing from Spain believed that by sailing west he could arrive in the Indies. When he reached what was recognized later as a new continent, he was certain he had reached his goal, the proof being native people wearing cotton garments. In 1492, European knew the source of cotton to be India, having no idea that South America had its own species of cotton.
p.82 – To take advantage of the demand for Asian silks, manufacturers in China and India began to produce silk in patterns preferred for European fashions. Indian cotton design also responded to European preferences.
p.83 – The superior technologies that flowed from industrialization made it possible for Britain to dominate India, not only economically but also militarily, so that by the 1770s, the British controlled “British India.”
6 – Dress and Fashion Move the Industrial Revolution Forward (18th Century)
p.91 – It was cotton manufacture and the need to speed up the steps in the process that stimulated the burst of inventive energy that was the Industrial Revolution.
p.92 – A major step forward was the invention in 1767 by James Hargreaves of the spinning jenny, a device that allowed one worker to spin multiple spools of yarn at one time.
The first cotton mill was built in 1771 in Derbyshire, England. It used spinning frames and it hired children.
p.93 – All these improvements were faster than the old hand processes, but were hindered by the lack of cotton fiber. The slow hand process of separating the cotton fiber from the seeds caused the blockage in the route to a cotton fabric. The problem was solved in 1792 when American Eli Whitney invented a machine, the cotton gin, which automated the separation of cotton seeds from cotton fibers.
p.97 – The European cottons could not compare in quality with the very costly imported goods, especially soft, soft, white muslin fabrics. As a result, they were the height of fashion and at the same time conveyed the wearer’s status as the wife of one of the high-ranking politicians who emerged from the French Revolution.
The ability to spin these fine cotton yarns depended on a labor supply like that available in India, willing and able to do the slow and difficult job of freeing the cotton fiber from its seeds, after which it was spun into delicate, fine yarn and woven into cloth superior to anything made in the west. Demand for the fabric was high; so were the prices.
7 – The Central Role of Dress and Fashion and the industrial Revolution (1800-1860)
p.102 – Joseph-Marie Jacquard of France made his first effort toward the end of the eighteenth century, but the invention of the jacquard loom did not become fully realized and operational until about 1818.
p.108 – Bustles – the round hoop-supported skirt gradually shifted its fullness to the back of the skirt and by 1870 required a change in the undergarment that supported the back fullness. Various solutions included a petticoat with horsehair ruffles placed at the back and several wire constructions, important when bustles grew more rigid in shape. One was a wired bustle and another was a coiled wire spring that benefitted from improvements in metallurgy.
8 – Dress, Fashion, and Social Changes Following the Industrial Revolution (19th Century)
p.115 – Probably the most famous of the campaigns waged against the new technologies is that of the Luddites, a name derived from Ludd, a pseudonym adopted by the leaders of a revolt against the use of wide knitting machines that made three or four stockings at once. This excess quantity of stockings lowered the prices and exacerbated the economic decline of these textile-working families. Groups of workers revolted against their situation, broke into premises housing the hated machines, and broke them up. This rebellion continued sporadically from about 1811 to 1817 and was centered largely in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire. The British government eventually stamped it out with arrests, executions, and penal deportations. The memory of the movement lingers on in Luddite, a term that has come to mean a person who objects to modern technology.
But by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the move to factory production of textiles was largely complete. However, textiles as they came from the loom were not ready to wear as clothing or use in the home. Shoes and stockings were produced by local craft persons and often sold to a local clientele. When sewing machines became available in the nineteenth century, work on making clothes could be either put out to workers at home or produced in a factory setting. The first ready-to-wear was predominantly menswear, but by the 1880s and 1890s, blouses and dresses were also being made.
James Watt patented his steam engine in 1769. Watt’s use of coal to produce the steam was a boon to the coal industry. As the population grew, manufacturing tended to be located in towns and cities where there were more workers.
p.115 – Factory-based manufacturing and the wealth of new machines to speed up the production line was beneficial to the entrepreneur, but workers had no control over working conditions and schedules. Fifteen- and sixteen-hour days were the norm. Safety and health issues were plentiful. Women and young children did much of the work and there was no regulations of child labor. Most of the factories were located in overcrowded cities and towns where poor housing, crime, and disease were rampant. The novels of Charles Dickens were often set in these neighbourhoods and provide a daunting picture of life for the working classes. Over time, improvements did come as social reformers fought for better working conditions, shorter hours, and imposition of laws regulating child labor.
p.116 – The French Revolution (1789-99) and the American Revolution (1775-83) were not without impacts on dress. Dress for the upper-class and royal French men and women in the decades before the French Revolution was ornate and decorative. Made of luxurious fabrics imported from the Orient or created by European textile firms such as those in Lyon in France and Spitalfields in London, dress of the affluent clearly displayed their wealth and status. By the time these revolutions had ended, the dress of men was on its way to a radical change.
p.118 – The empire silhouette had evolved into a more hourglass shape by the early 1820s and by the middle of the 1830s women’s skirts were full, bodice fitted, and sleeves enormous. By the 1860s, skirts had grown still wider, but by 1870 the fullness moved to the back of the skirt, supported by a bustle. The bustle changed its configuration several times, but persisted until in the 1890s it disappeared, being replaced by an hourglass silhouette not without some resemblance to the shapes of the early 1830s.
p.120 – Thorstein Veblen (1899) identifies three means of displaying economic status: conspicuous leisure, conspicuous consumption, and conspicuous waste. He was dress as a prime example of these practices and used fashionable dress to illuminate his ideas.
In his principle of conspicuous leisure, he argued that wearing dress that does not permit the wearer to do serious physical work shows that one is sufficiently affluent that one need not labor to support an affluent lifestyle.
Conspicuous waste can be associated with the practice of discarding garments or other items of dress, not because they are no longer serviceable, but simply because they are no longer fashionable.
Styles of Veblen’s youth – he was born in 1857 – could have led him to see the bustle styles of the 1870s and 1880s as exemplifying conspicuous leisure, in that even the simpler, thought still cumbersome, women’s daytime dresses would not have been comfortable for housewifely tidying or cleaning. They were very good examples of conspicuous consumption, requiring as they did large yardages of heavily ornamented fabrics. The skirts were multi-layered and draped. Far more fabric is consumed in these garments than would be needed to make a serviceable garment and with the rapidity of fashion change in the bustle period, they would have been discarded long before they were worn out (conspicuous waste).
p.121 – But both Mills and Veblen fail to recognize that the fashion industry, growing as it was in the late nineteenth century, was not the cause of an insatiable demand for novelty and change. What they overlooked is that participation in fashion has been part of human behaviour in many cultures and periods of time. In fact, it may be a basic form of human behaviour in that it allows both self-expression and conformity. The fashion industry utilizing the products made possible through the Industrial Revolution has effectively exploited these behaviours, building a complex industry structured to allow its consumers to satisfy their desires for self-expression within the parameters of current fashionable dress. In other words, through fashion we not only show that we belong, but can also express a personal style within the context of the explicit or implicit limits of custom. Some cultures may set restrictions on allowable personal style and require close conformity to these mores. Others may have dew restrictions and reward innovation.
But while the Industrial Revolution did not create fashion, its technologies clearly provided the raw materials of fashion – the textiles, the equipment for making items of dress – ranging from garments to a host of accessories, which expanded the means to transport these products to the marketplace, and provided incomes that enabled many more individuals to participate in the fashion process.
p.123-24 – Conspicuous consumption – Wearing clothing designed by Worth would have been a proclamation of wealth. To select the gown the customer would have had to travel to Paris, order the gown, and be available for fittings once the dress was finished.
p.33 – Silk appears c.4900 BCE and the Chinese appear to have maintained a monopoly on the production of cultivated silk for at least 2,500 years.
Authorities generally agree that cotton was first cultivated on the Indian subcontinent at some time in the third millennium BCE. And much at the same period of time, it appears to have come into use for textiles in South America. The species native to India is not the same as that in South America, indicating that cotton was an independent development in each area.
p.35 – We know that although wool was worn, linen was the major fiber used for Egyptian dress.
p.39 – The silk of China and cotton of India were unique and highly desirable textiles that were pivotal in establishing trade with other regions. But long before the trade routes carried silk to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the aforementioned durable kinds of materials used for additional elements of dress had been moving around the world. Trade between the Far East and Europe in the period from the second century BCE to about the fourteenth century CE utilized the so-called Silk Road. Even though wild silk was apparently used in the Indus Valley and on the Greek Island of Cos, these fabrics did not compare with the luxurious silk fabrics that gave China a product with no parallel in the Middle East and the West. The Chinese closely guarded their secrets of sericulture and the technological skill needed for its creation.
p.48 – The tunic and toga would not have required innovative technologies for their production, but would have relied on well-established weaving processes that may have been adopted from earlier civilizations. The fibers available to the Romans were linen, wool, hemp, cotton, and silk, the latter two being luxuries and more likely used for women’s dress than for men’s, as silk fabrics were viewed by some influential leaders as effeminate. Cotton was imported from India and silk made its way across the trade routes from China.
4 – Technology and Dress Facilitate Fashion Change (Early Medieval Period to the 17th Century)
p.53 – As the northern Germanic tribes had gained more influence, clothing styles had altered. Tribesmen wore stockings, trousers, and boots. Clothing for both men and women was made from cut sections of fabrics sewn together rather than being draped from lengths of fabric.
The fibers that they could use were linen and wool, produced in Europe, and the imported luxury fabrics, cotton and silk. European silk and cotton production began gradually, and by the twelfth century these fabrics were also being produced in Europe.
By the twelfth century, Italian craftsmen were skilled in making both cotton and silk fabrics. The tools that they used were most likely variations of tools used in India, in China, and/or in the Middle East, that had travelled westward as fabric forming technology had advanced.
p.61 – The Chinese had been making paper since the first century CE. Printing came later. The earliest Chinese block printed book is dated at CE 868 and moveable type is thought to have been used beginning around CE 1041 to 1048. Block printing had been used to print fabrics in Europe as early as the thirteenth century. Block printed books became available in the early 1400s.
5 – Asian Developments in Technology, Dress, and Fashion (Neolithic Period Until the 17th Century)
p.71 – For many centuries, China and India had a virtual monopoly on the cultivation and production of two important textile fibers: silk and cotton. Not only did they supply these textile fibers and fabrics to the rest of Eurasia, but over time and with trade, the technologies they developed also made important contributions to textile manufacture in other parts of the world.
p.72 – Nineteenth-century German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen named these routes “the Silk Road” after silk fabrics, one of the most important items of trade. Much of this silk was travelling west.
p.73 – The technologies required to transform textile fibers into textile fabrics can be divided into those used for preparation of the fiber, spinning the fibers into yarns, uniting the yarns into a fabric structure, and providing special characteristics to the fabric through processes called finishes.
p.74 – Desire for silk outside of China was a major impetus to the development of world trade.
p.75 – Another Chinese invention was the collapsible umbrella that protected against both rain and sun (made of oiled paper from mulberry bark), an innovation of the Wei Dynasty (CE 386-535).
p.77 – Colors were obtained from plants that included a local Chinese indigo for blue, madder for red, gardenia for yellow, acorns for black, and gromwell, a plant that produces a purple dye. The foreign textiles that arrived in China often influenced the design of Chinese textiles.
p.78 – Indian technology was responsible for excellence in dying and weaving that created beautifully patterned cloth.
p.80 – Christopher Columbus sailing from Spain believed that by sailing west he could arrive in the Indies. When he reached what was recognized later as a new continent, he was certain he had reached his goal, the proof being native people wearing cotton garments. In 1492, European knew the source of cotton to be India, having no idea that South America had its own species of cotton.
p.82 – To take advantage of the demand for Asian silks, manufacturers in China and India began to produce silk in patterns preferred for European fashions. Indian cotton design also responded to European preferences.
p.83 – The superior technologies that flowed from industrialization made it possible for Britain to dominate India, not only economically but also militarily, so that by the 1770s, the British controlled “British India.”
6 – Dress and Fashion Move the Industrial Revolution Forward (18th Century)
p.91 – It was cotton manufacture and the need to speed up the steps in the process that stimulated the burst of inventive energy that was the Industrial Revolution.
p.92 – A major step forward was the invention in 1767 by James Hargreaves of the spinning jenny, a device that allowed one worker to spin multiple spools of yarn at one time.
The first cotton mill was built in 1771 in Derbyshire, England. It used spinning frames and it hired children.
p.93 – All these improvements were faster than the old hand processes, but were hindered by the lack of cotton fiber. The slow hand process of separating the cotton fiber from the seeds caused the blockage in the route to a cotton fabric. The problem was solved in 1792 when American Eli Whitney invented a machine, the cotton gin, which automated the separation of cotton seeds from cotton fibers.
p.97 – The European cottons could not compare in quality with the very costly imported goods, especially soft, soft, white muslin fabrics. As a result, they were the height of fashion and at the same time conveyed the wearer’s status as the wife of one of the high-ranking politicians who emerged from the French Revolution.
The ability to spin these fine cotton yarns depended on a labor supply like that available in India, willing and able to do the slow and difficult job of freeing the cotton fiber from its seeds, after which it was spun into delicate, fine yarn and woven into cloth superior to anything made in the west. Demand for the fabric was high; so were the prices.
7 – The Central Role of Dress and Fashion and the industrial Revolution (1800-1860)
p.102 – Joseph-Marie Jacquard of France made his first effort toward the end of the eighteenth century, but the invention of the jacquard loom did not become fully realized and operational until about 1818.
p.108 – Bustles – the round hoop-supported skirt gradually shifted its fullness to the back of the skirt and by 1870 required a change in the undergarment that supported the back fullness. Various solutions included a petticoat with horsehair ruffles placed at the back and several wire constructions, important when bustles grew more rigid in shape. One was a wired bustle and another was a coiled wire spring that benefitted from improvements in metallurgy.
8 – Dress, Fashion, and Social Changes Following the Industrial Revolution (19th Century)
p.115 – Probably the most famous of the campaigns waged against the new technologies is that of the Luddites, a name derived from Ludd, a pseudonym adopted by the leaders of a revolt against the use of wide knitting machines that made three or four stockings at once. This excess quantity of stockings lowered the prices and exacerbated the economic decline of these textile-working families. Groups of workers revolted against their situation, broke into premises housing the hated machines, and broke them up. This rebellion continued sporadically from about 1811 to 1817 and was centered largely in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire. The British government eventually stamped it out with arrests, executions, and penal deportations. The memory of the movement lingers on in Luddite, a term that has come to mean a person who objects to modern technology.
But by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the move to factory production of textiles was largely complete. However, textiles as they came from the loom were not ready to wear as clothing or use in the home. Shoes and stockings were produced by local craft persons and often sold to a local clientele. When sewing machines became available in the nineteenth century, work on making clothes could be either put out to workers at home or produced in a factory setting. The first ready-to-wear was predominantly menswear, but by the 1880s and 1890s, blouses and dresses were also being made.
James Watt patented his steam engine in 1769. Watt’s use of coal to produce the steam was a boon to the coal industry. As the population grew, manufacturing tended to be located in towns and cities where there were more workers.
p.115 – Factory-based manufacturing and the wealth of new machines to speed up the production line was beneficial to the entrepreneur, but workers had no control over working conditions and schedules. Fifteen- and sixteen-hour days were the norm. Safety and health issues were plentiful. Women and young children did much of the work and there was no regulations of child labor. Most of the factories were located in overcrowded cities and towns where poor housing, crime, and disease were rampant. The novels of Charles Dickens were often set in these neighbourhoods and provide a daunting picture of life for the working classes. Over time, improvements did come as social reformers fought for better working conditions, shorter hours, and imposition of laws regulating child labor.
p.116 – The French Revolution (1789-99) and the American Revolution (1775-83) were not without impacts on dress. Dress for the upper-class and royal French men and women in the decades before the French Revolution was ornate and decorative. Made of luxurious fabrics imported from the Orient or created by European textile firms such as those in Lyon in France and Spitalfields in London, dress of the affluent clearly displayed their wealth and status. By the time these revolutions had ended, the dress of men was on its way to a radical change.
p.118 – The empire silhouette had evolved into a more hourglass shape by the early 1820s and by the middle of the 1830s women’s skirts were full, bodice fitted, and sleeves enormous. By the 1860s, skirts had grown still wider, but by 1870 the fullness moved to the back of the skirt, supported by a bustle. The bustle changed its configuration several times, but persisted until in the 1890s it disappeared, being replaced by an hourglass silhouette not without some resemblance to the shapes of the early 1830s.
p.120 – Thorstein Veblen (1899) identifies three means of displaying economic status: conspicuous leisure, conspicuous consumption, and conspicuous waste. He was dress as a prime example of these practices and used fashionable dress to illuminate his ideas.
In his principle of conspicuous leisure, he argued that wearing dress that does not permit the wearer to do serious physical work shows that one is sufficiently affluent that one need not labor to support an affluent lifestyle.
Conspicuous waste can be associated with the practice of discarding garments or other items of dress, not because they are no longer serviceable, but simply because they are no longer fashionable.
Styles of Veblen’s youth – he was born in 1857 – could have led him to see the bustle styles of the 1870s and 1880s as exemplifying conspicuous leisure, in that even the simpler, thought still cumbersome, women’s daytime dresses would not have been comfortable for housewifely tidying or cleaning. They were very good examples of conspicuous consumption, requiring as they did large yardages of heavily ornamented fabrics. The skirts were multi-layered and draped. Far more fabric is consumed in these garments than would be needed to make a serviceable garment and with the rapidity of fashion change in the bustle period, they would have been discarded long before they were worn out (conspicuous waste).
p.121 – But both Mills and Veblen fail to recognize that the fashion industry, growing as it was in the late nineteenth century, was not the cause of an insatiable demand for novelty and change. What they overlooked is that participation in fashion has been part of human behaviour in many cultures and periods of time. In fact, it may be a basic form of human behaviour in that it allows both self-expression and conformity. The fashion industry utilizing the products made possible through the Industrial Revolution has effectively exploited these behaviours, building a complex industry structured to allow its consumers to satisfy their desires for self-expression within the parameters of current fashionable dress. In other words, through fashion we not only show that we belong, but can also express a personal style within the context of the explicit or implicit limits of custom. Some cultures may set restrictions on allowable personal style and require close conformity to these mores. Others may have dew restrictions and reward innovation.
But while the Industrial Revolution did not create fashion, its technologies clearly provided the raw materials of fashion – the textiles, the equipment for making items of dress – ranging from garments to a host of accessories, which expanded the means to transport these products to the marketplace, and provided incomes that enabled many more individuals to participate in the fashion process.
p.123-24 – Conspicuous consumption – Wearing clothing designed by Worth would have been a proclamation of wealth. To select the gown the customer would have had to travel to Paris, order the gown, and be available for fittings once the dress was finished.
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