Fashion
Fashion
Early Styles. The first generation of European settlers brought with them the fashions of their day, which functioned to place them within specific social ranks as well as to adorn them. Dutch settlers of all ranks wore clothing of similar style, but their social rank was distinguished by the relative coarseness or fineness of the fabric. French settlers distinguished their rank both by the type of cloth used and by the style. The early soldier-settlers of the Spanish borderlands clad themselves in
military attire but always kept an eye trained on the finery of the wealthy at home, whom they intended to emulate once they achieved New World wealth and position. Portraits of English settlers of this period depict gentlemen and ladies in dashing Elizabethan garments adorned with showy lace collars and cuffs and reveal that colonists of Massachusetts Bay shared Virginia adventurers’ taste for fashionable clothes. Puritan ministers urged people to renounce the outer vanity of ostentatious dress for the inward adornment of a pious life. New England magistrates tried to enforce their ministers’ teaching through laws regulating dress. Nevertheless, Puritans were not limited to somber clothing of black and gray. The laws aimed mainly at preventing ordinary farmers or craftsmen from dressing ostentatiously or “above their station” in clothing regarded as appropriate only for wealthy and important families. Puritans were generally free to clothe themselves in the range of colors and styles appropriate to their rank or position in society. The persistent anxiety of ministers and magistrates over clothing suggests that Puritan men and women never lost their eye for fashion and constantly pushed the limits of the law with fancy clothes and accessories.
THE WELL-DRESSED COLONIST IN 1740
Like most aspects of colonial life, dress varied according to social station as well as style. Slaves received only a change or two of clothes per year, while wealthy gentlefolk possessed extensive wardrobes tailored for every occasion in a variety of fine imported textiles. The average family living between these two extremes might possess the following clothes:
Man: One good suit, two fine shirts, three coarse shirts, two pairs of work trousers, two pairs of breeches, one waistcoat, one coat, and one hat.
Woman: One good gown, one petticoat, one good cloak, two bodices or short gowns, two aprons, two shifts, and a coarse cloak.
Source: David Freeman Hawke, Everyday Life in Early America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
American Influence. Fashions in the middle and later seventeenth century were dictated by the materials available to most settlers as well as by adaptations to their new environment. Settlers of the Spanish borderlands and New France sometimes adapted elements of Native American dress and adapted their apparel to the climate. French settlers often dressed in buckskin, and the hooded wool coat known as a capote characteristically shielded men from the icy Canadian winds. To enforce the racial caste system of New Spain, a law of 1582 prohibited mestizo women (those of mixed Spanish and Indian
blood) from wearing Native American dresses. These women adopted a shawl known as the rebozo, which over time came to be finely crafted and decorated. English colonists brought with them a knowledge of spinning and weaving. They never developed a large textile industry, however, and imported cloth was relatively scarce and expensive. Homespun woolens and linens became the common apparel of ordinary seventeenth-century Americans. Yet the bewigged figures of portraits reveal that prominent colonists—even Puritan ministers such as Cotton Mather—continued to imitate the styles of their English contemporaries.
London. After 1700 a growing range of English textiles began flowing into colonial ports; prices dropped so low that colonial producers could not compete; and some households no longer found it worthwhile to invest time and labor in producing inferior homespun cloth. Newspapers advertised the varieties of English and Dutch chintzes, silks, linens, damasks, woolens, velvets, and laces. They also included other items of apparel and accessories such as stockings, gloves, and buttons. Tailors placed their own advertisements nearby, enticing customers with their ability to cut and sew in the “latest London fashions.” Diarists traveling the countryside often recorded remarks on the widespread imitation of European fashion in America. In 1740 the Anglican preacher George Whitefield remarked on the fashionable dress of audiences from Massachusetts to Georgia, going so far as to declare that his followers in Charleston, South Carolina, dressed more extravagantly than gentry from the “court-end of London!” Portraiture of eighteenth-century gentry bears out the observations of diarists such as Whitefield, and historians studying wills and probate records have discovered that ordinary colonists imitated the fashions of their betters by buying and wearing an increasing range of cheap imported items. Many colonial leaders worried that the widespread wearing of fashionable wigs, fancy dresses, handsome waistcoats, silk stockings, and silver buckles was making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the gentry from their inferiors. Advertisements for runaways reveal that indentured servants and slaves were dressing in the cast-off fashions of the period.
The Frontier. Eighteenth-century backcountry apparel often contrasted sharply with that worn on the coast. Traders and settlers adopted certain articles of Native American clothing such as buckskin or woolen leggings both to establish cultural ties with them and because the clothing was better adapted to the environment. The Indian commissioner Sir William Johnson
adopted Iroquois dress to help him gain trust and understanding as he pursued diplomacy among the Six Nations of upstate New York. Further south in the Carolina backcountry the Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason expressed shock at women who went about barefoot and immodestly dressed for that time in thin, tight-fitting garments that exposed their lower legs. Such women’s apparel was partly the result of poverty and partly an adaptation to the hot southern climate. The adaptations were usually temporary as well: frontier settlers could seldom resist fancy eastern fashions when they became available at affordable prices.
Sources
Gary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994);
Jack Cassin-Scott, Costume and Fashion in Colour, 1550-1760 (Poole, U.K.: Blandford Press, 1975);
Alice Morse Earle, Costume of Colonial Times (Detroit: Gale, 1974).