Hey look! I co-edited a book! It’s pretty good, if I do say so myself. Cosma Shalizi’s contribution is the best. Overall, I think the volume is nice for the way the various pieces talk to each other well, while also addressing their subject, Franco Moretti’s book. Plus: free online, Creative Commons, that good stuff!
To celebrate, I’m going to be posting follow-up stuff about Moretti-type stuff in the days to come. Also, I’ll try to pull together some thoughts about academic publishing and open publishing. This book is a (rather slow-ripening) fruit of the Valve book events of yore. Been meaning to get back to that sort of thing, but life keeps getting in the way in other shapes and forms. (Plus I have some sort of cold at the moment. Terribly sore throat.)
In his contribution to the volume, Cosma discusses, briefly, Stanley Lieberson’s A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change
One cannot really talk of fashion becoming all-powerful before about 1700. At that time the word gained a new lease of life and spread everywhere with its new meaning: keeping up with the times. From then on fashion in the modern sense began to influence everything: the pace of change had never been as swift in earlier times.
In fact, the further back in time one goes, even in Europe, one is more likely to find the still waters of ancient situations like those we have described in India, China and Islam. The general rule was changelessness. Until towards the beginning of the twelfth century costumes in Europe remained entirely as they had been in Roman times: long tunics falling straight to the feet for women and to the knees for men. For century upon century, costume had remained unchanged. Any innovation, such as the lengthening of men’s clothes in the twelfth century was strongly criticized …
The really big change came in about 1350 with the sudden shortening of men’s costume, which was viewed as scandalous by the old, the prudent and the defenders of tradition …
In a way, one could say that fashion began here. For after this, ways of dressing became subject to change in Europe.
Do you think this is true?
My immediate reaction is to hypothesize that the basic dynamics of fashion have to go back a lot further. Once you get certain sorts of social divisions and status competition – which you surely will in any wealthy urban environment – you are almost inevitably going to get some sort of one-upsmanship churn, along some axis, deserving the name ‘fashion’. I immediately start half-recollecting bits from Aristophanes and Plato that suggest ancient Athenians were sensitive to changes in dress fashions. But I don’t really know. What do you think? (Better yet: what do you know?) When did fashion begin?
{ 48 comments }
Anderson 03.01.11 at 4:31 pm
Hey look! I co-edited a book! It’s pretty good, if I do say so myself. Cosma Shalizi’s contribution is the best.
Possible advice for future editing ventures: do not piss off all but one of your contributors by telling them whose chapter you think is “best”?
Lots of editors have thought their contributors were friends and too cool to be petty about such things. A few of those editors were even correct about that.
Tad Brennan 03.01.11 at 4:37 pm
Peter Green’s translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria 3.150 ff.:
“And I can’t be comprehensive about hair fashions
when every day brings out a chic new style…”
Roman hairstyles certainly evolved over time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_hairstyles
enough that skilled art historians can do a lot towards dating a portrait bust simply by looking at the treatment of the hair.
So, no, I do not think that before 1300 A.D. “the general rule was changelessness,” unless by “general” one means “…with many exceptions.”
Henry 03.01.11 at 4:45 pm
On Anderson’s advice – yes in general, but Cosma’s piece (and yes – he is a mate) in the volume is extraordinary. I described it back in the day as perhaps the best piece of scholar-blogging I’d ever read. Today, I would be inclined to get rid of ‘perhaps’ and ‘scholar’ as modifiers. It’s a genuinely important article, and I hope that print publication helps draw people’s attention to it again.
Rich Puchalsky 03.01.11 at 5:02 pm
It’s good that you’re still doing these things. I’d been thinking of writing some kind of summation of the projects of the Valve, Berube’s blog, etc. (a lot of these blogs effectively died at about the same time) that treated the book publishing project as a failed effort, doomed by its labor intensivity.
ajay 03.01.11 at 5:28 pm
Until towards the beginning of the twelfth century costumes in Europe remained entirely as they had been in Roman times: long tunics falling straight to the feet for women and to the knees for men.
I am pretty sceptical that everyone in Europe dressed like this for a millennium. For a start, the trouser was not unknown among Germans and Celts, even during the Empire.
Ineluctable 6th century fashion history aside: Procopius, on the Mullet.
First the rebels [he’s talking about the Victory Riots here- ajay] revolutionized the style of wearing their hair. For they had it cut differently from the rest of the Romans: not molesting the mustache or beard, which they allowed to keep on growing as long as it would, as the Persians do, but clipping their hair short on the front of the head down to the temples, and letting it hang down in great length and disorder in the back, as the Massageti do. This weird combination they called the Hun haircut.
“Cato in the front, Lucullus in the back”, as they probably didn’t say.
Alex 03.01.11 at 5:38 pm
clipping their hair short on the front of the head down to the temples, and letting it hang down in great length and disorder in the back, as the Massageti do. This weird combination they called the Hun haircut.
The birth of the Vokuhila.
Gene O'Grady 03.01.11 at 5:42 pm
You might check Seneca (I think it’s Letter 92, but I’m not sure) on the way Maecenas wore his toga; there’s a whole lot of social implication into Maecenas’ lifestyle.
Or Cicero on the beards of his younger oratorical and poetic (remembering that Cicero was a poet, not as bad as his reputation) contemporaries like Calvus (and Catullus) — I think it’s something about a grex of barbatuli iuvenes, but again that’s from memory.
Ginger Yellow 03.01.11 at 5:57 pm
I was going to raise Tad’s Roman hairstyles point – you can even deduce the speed at which fashions spread across the empire from the surviving artefacts. So certainly “fashion” existed long before 1700, or even 1350. But it could conceivably be true that general clothing forms remained more constant previously, subject to variation in colour or accoutrements. Sadly I don’t know enough about the evidence to say either way.
rm 03.01.11 at 6:06 pm
It’s obviously wrong (nothing is changeless, geez), but then again, I’ve read evidence somewhere that European clothing shows continuities going back to examples from many-thousands-of-years-old Central Asian archeological digs — — — something about tartan patterns and tunics and Indo-Europeans. No, I’m too busy to google it. But it depends what he means by “changeless,” because a lot of other things were relatively flat curves until the modern era, when the curves start to get steeper and steeper (world population, life expectancies, number of books in the world, global temperatures). In an urban society where the biggest city had 20,000 people, how much fashion could they generate?
Marco Polo 03.01.11 at 6:10 pm
The history of the later Han dynasty mentions a satirical jingle from the first century CE:
â€Chang’an had a saying, ‘If the city favors high top-knots, in the provinces they go up a full foot. If the city favors broad eyebrows, in the provinces they go nearly halfway round the forehead; if the city favors big sleeves, in the provinces they use a full bolt of silk’.â€
That tends to show that not only is changing fashion very old, but so is the emulation of it by provincials and the consequent mockery of the provincials by sophisticates in the capital.
Delicious Pundit 03.01.11 at 6:27 pm
Confidential to ajay: speaking of mullets, I alsofound in Tacitus the origins of the NHL playoff beard.
Myles 03.01.11 at 6:44 pm
It’s obviously wrong (nothing is changeless, geez), but then again, I’ve read evidence somewhere that European clothing shows continuities going back to examples from many-thousands-of-years-old Central Asian archeological digs———something about tartan patterns and tunics and Indo-Europeans.
Well, this is a topic I do know something about. Modern male fashion started, more or less, with Beau Brummell, and it marked a significant departure from nearly all previous fashion sensibilities, in that the chief attribute of fashion became the cut, rather than decoration or dazzling fanciness. In a sense, it reflected the classicising sensibility of the contemporary age, in that the object of male fashion became bringing out the naturalistic, ideal human form itself, rather than the transmission of other attributes of the wearer. The suit might be a whole nest of trompes-l’oeil, but their purpose was, as much as possible, to make the wearer resemble an ideal type of human being, rather than sheer vanity.
Myles 03.01.11 at 6:58 pm
Consulting the Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, it says that ancient Greece had the first beauty shops, where you could get shop-girls to dye your cheeks white (with lead). Intriguingly, ancient Greek women, who had blonde hair, often had it dyed in red or in blue.
Timothy Burke 03.01.11 at 7:06 pm
But Cosma’s is the best. No harm from speaking truth.
I know I’m always a pain when it comes to these things–tell me I have a deadline and I immediately go look for a deep hole and pull earth over my head–but I certainly think that “book events” on this model ought to at the very least kill off book reviewing as it is ordinarily practiced in academia: every journal should just jettison its book review section and we should instead be doing this kind of thing: more reactive, looser, more dialogic, somewhat less concerned with mutual production of reputation capital without turning instead into a mutual evisceration deathmatch.
Fats Durston 03.01.11 at 7:11 pm
Although the volume of trade for coastal West Africans certainly increased greatly in the late 1600s (suggesting increasing fashion cycles post-1700 as dated by Braudel), West African styles certainly began changing radically from the late fifteenth century. Around 40% of imports into West African ports ca. 1600 were textiles, and these came from Europe, foreign African locations, and South Asia.
You can see discussions of fashion in Ibn Battuta’s 1330s travels to coastal East Africa–he notes where elite East Africans have adopted Egyptian and Levantine dress. Quasi-mythical foundation stories–which date from prior to 1500–of East African cities include strong evidence of fashion motivating international trade.
Leo Africanus, in Cairo, mocks the fashion sensibilities of those urbanites in 1507, apparently dedicated followers of Ottoman and Indian trends.
Bruce Baugh 03.01.11 at 7:40 pm
Changes in the nature of sumptuary laws provides some good clues about what authorities that was going on in other people’s fashion sense, too.
John Quiggin 03.01.11 at 7:42 pm
What’s really striking is the end of male fashion. Men’s clothes today are essentially the same as they were 100 to 150 years ago, with a very gradual trend towards dressing down. Compare say Washington, Lincoln (sans hat) and Obama to see an example.
And year to year fluctuations in fashion for men are confined to a tiny subset of youth. Thomas Frank has some excellent stuff on this IIRC
John Quiggin 03.01.11 at 7:43 pm
Re Washington, I meant to make the point that men’s fashions changed much faster before, say, 1850 than they have since.
Gene O'Grady 03.01.11 at 8:13 pm
Following Professor Quiggin’s comment #17, I have heard that the modern male necktie was basically popularized by Charles Dickens (No guarantee that that’s true). At any rate it came in ca. 1860 and has been in vogue since after a great deal of fairly rapid change before that.
And I’m not sure about the comment that referred to a lack of cities with more than 20,000 people. The demographics of the Roman Empire is a quagmire, but at least Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, and (late) Constantinople had more than ten times that many people.
RBurns 03.01.11 at 9:20 pm
J Caesar caught a few catty comments about how he wrapped his tunic. It was probably worth mentioning at the time because of its uniqueness and therefor not a fashion. But the Caesar cut (hair not back) was later to become all the rage.
piglet 03.01.11 at 9:57 pm
In a post like this, I would appreciate some non-insider information of what the book is actually about.
enzo rossi 03.01.11 at 10:12 pm
If you’ll allow a modicum of stipulation, it sounds as though you may be confusing fashion and style: surely in any affluent urban environment many people would try to compete for status through their way of dressing. So they’ll try to have better materials, better cut, better workmanship, and so on. That would be style. But style doesn’t require fashion: the basic shape and type of garments would remain the same — in other words, no garments would ever be ‘dated’, ‘out of fashion‘, etc.
Jonathan 03.01.11 at 10:14 pm
The book is about Franco Moretti’s work using quantitative methods in literary history. It has contributions from history, philosophy, and statistics, in addition to several from literary criticism. For those who remember the original event, the book version has an introduction which surveys the use of evolutionary concepts in Moretti’s work, among other things and some otherwise expanded and edited entries.
piglet 03.01.11 at 10:15 pm
“For a start, the trouser was not unknown among Germans and Celts, even during the Empire.”
What exactly happened to the trouser after Asterix’s time? When did it come back in fashion?
piglet 03.01.11 at 10:18 pm
Never mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trousers
piglet 03.01.11 at 10:19 pm
“The book is about Franco Moretti’s work using quantitative methods in literary history.”
That explains why we are discussing male fashion ;-)
realdelia 03.01.11 at 10:28 pm
Sorry about this (slightly), but, as an editor, I can’t let this pass:
Intriguingly, ancient Greek women, who had blonde hair, often had it dyed in red or in blue.
One comma too many. And ‘ancient Greek women’ … harsh, very harsh.
Myles 03.01.11 at 11:05 pm
One comma too many. And ‘ancient Greek women’ … harsh, very harsh.
Ahhhhh.
What about the comma, though?
Greg Hays 03.01.11 at 11:44 pm
One comma too many.
One?
Harold 03.02.11 at 12:31 am
Trousers were characteristic of circum-Arctic tribes and of northern Europeans, barbarians and otherwise, for obvious reasons. Their wholesale adoption by South Europe and Asia has been striking (and recent).
Just offhand, I would say that styles depicted in manuscript illuminations were enormously conservative, since scribes copied from other books and not from life. They depicted unchanging Greco-Roman costumes. When painting became more accepted in Western churches, etc., artists initially stuck to illuminated manuscripts (Byzantine) as their models. And, of course their art works are one of our main source for knowing what people looked like. Around 1350 artists began to copy from “nature” rather than storybooks and maybe we don’t really know what people wore until then. On the other hand it is reasonable to expect wholesale changes in fashion to be facilitated by improved communications technology.
Something that surprises me, however, is that since about 1960, the pace of fashion change seems to have slowed down. It is harder to tell the difference between styles in clothing and makeup from 1970 to 2010, for example, than from 1920 to 1950.
Glen Tomkins 03.02.11 at 1:18 am
I have another theory
During those long centuries from which no record survives of people talking about having sex , they didn’t actually have sex.
Antiquity is pretty close to being sex-talk free, despite its reputation in certain quarters. Yes, there are bits in Plato and Aristophanes, and, okay, Catullus, too. But compared to today, those people were, literarily at least, monks.
But there are great long stretches where none of the surviving literature mentions sex, at all. These eras must have been sex-free.
You see, if there is no written material for me to theorize about, if there is no grist for my mill, then there can not have been any underlying reality, because, actually, there is no reality apart from my theorizing.
John Holbo 03.02.11 at 2:24 am
Well, the reason why I’m making the names/fashion/Moretti connection is that I’m planning a follow-up post about Moretti’s articles – post our event – on changing fashions in book titles. Novel titles. He doesn’t actually discuss Lieberson’s work on names. But it seems like there’s an interesting connection there. Changing fashions in naming kids. Changing fashions in naming your novel. The reason why I wasn’t making this clearer in the above post is, presumably, that I have a cold.
grackle 03.02.11 at 3:55 am
Intriguingly, ancient Greek women, who had blonde hair, often had it dyed in red or in blue.
Just the right number of commas to say what it says; any less and it would say something else. I know from this sentence that all ancient Greek women had blond hair. Who would have known?
Myles 03.02.11 at 4:30 am
I know from this sentence that all ancient Greek women had blond hair.
Yes. I think this might be the part which some might have missed. (This is what the encyclopedia tells me anyhow.)
Gene O'Grady 03.02.11 at 4:44 am
I think Glen Tompkins has it wrong. Genre for genre ancient literature has more specific sex than subsequent literature. Thucydides, of course, has no more sex than economics. Suetonius, on the other hand, had more than Dr. Johnson’s biographies.
The issue, tho’, is often a similar one to the evidence for attitudes to fashion or style — much of the classical evidence comes moralists (although it’s maybe a little funny to call Aristophanes or Juvenal a moralist), or writers of diatribe or propaganda.
John Holbo 03.02.11 at 5:04 am
I should have made clearer, as well, that the Braudel passage is obviously at least somewhat hyperbolic. A bit overdramatic about the contrast between change and changelessness. What I’m not sure about is whether there’s real truth to it, even toned down. As Lieberson makes clear, you can have fashions in lots of things besides clothes. It’s not clear whether Braudel is just restricting himself to clothes and saying, in effect, fashion-in-clothing starts at a certain point. (But fashion in other things might have started much earlier.) There is also the style/fashion distinction. I wasn’t confused about this, although I might have been unclear. You can have ancient Greek beauty parlors without having a fashion system. You could have the ‘Athenian style’ (as opposed to the Corinthian or Spartan style) and it might be constant over time, i.e. not subject to fashion shifts. But I’m remembering, in particular, that bit from Aristophanes when ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ get in an argument, in “The Clouds”. And ‘right’ is identified as an elderly gentleman who wears his chiton in an out-of-fashion style, with a grasshopper brooch, or whatever it was. The implication being that there really has been a fashion shift and the old guy is behind the times. ‘Right’ is out of fashion, and ‘wrong’ is in fashion. That’s the larger joke. So you have not just the concept of fashion, but the humorously absurd extension of it to moral argument. ‘Wrong is the new black!’
mclaren 03.02.11 at 5:11 am
“It that time the world gained a new lease of life and spread everywhere with its new meaning: keeping up with the times. “
I am quite certain that you mean “word” rather than “world.”
Gene O'Grady 03.02.11 at 6:25 am
The Athenian grasshopper (my British teachers called it a cicada) was on top of a hairband in a way I’ve never really understood. See Thucydides 1.6 for a sort of description, and comments that are relevant to the whole discussion.
Sorry for showing my pedantry. I recall looking at that passage with T B L Webster (born 1906) in the late 60’s and I think he was quietly amused by the thought that it was the old fogies that had long hair way back when.
maidhc 03.02.11 at 9:36 am
One thing that happened around the late medieval period was the development of tailoring. The old tunics were basically rectangular bits of cloth sewed together. You showed your status with better quality cloth or adding jewels. The old trousers were pretty shapeless too. That’s why people wore cross-garters.
Shaped clothing, properly inset sleeves and things like buttonholes were newer developments.
By the Tudor period in England you can see that cut is becoming important and tailoring is much more sophisticated.
People tend to use something as an indicator of status, but what it is exactly can vary. In 20th century Britain accent was a status indicator, but in the US this was much less so. Clothing was once a status indicator, but now billionaires wear jeans and T-shirts (on the weekends, anyway). Houses, vacation homes and cars are big status indicators today.
Cultural awareness–having a broad knowledge of literature, music, art–was once a status indicator (that the person had enough leisure time to follow such interests), but today it is almost a reverse status indicator, showing that a person is probably an ink-stained academic whose time has been wasted in non-pecuniary pursuits.
ajay 03.02.11 at 11:16 am
What’s really striking is the end of male fashion. Men’s clothes today are essentially the same as they were 100 to 150 years ago, with a very gradual trend towards dressing down. Compare say Washington, Lincoln (sans hat) and Obama to see an example.
But this has sort-of happened before. A man dressed in 1600 style (doublet, ruff and hose) would be ridiculed in 1650 (coat, long waistcoat and breeches), but a man in reasonable 1650 style would I think be more or less OK in 1750, with the exception of his wearing far too large a wig.
Really you’re looking at a punctuated-equilibrium model, with two main spasms of evolution: the Jacobeans going from hose to breeches and the Regency going from breeches to trousers.
Glen Tomkins 03.02.11 at 2:56 pm
@35,
Well, Suetonius only describes emperors having sex, and it’s fairly twisted sex, so the only sex going on in the early Empire was twisted sex involving emperors. Suetonius doesn’t talk much about the common folk, who must therefore have been celibate in his day. If there were common folk way back then, which is not at all clear from Suetonius.
Clearly, all of us today are descended from Roman emperors, who somehow managed the occasional accidental act of procreative sex some time when Suetonius’s sources weren’t around.
Glen Tomkins 03.02.11 at 4:09 pm
Lack of Context
For almost all of the historical record, we lack sufficient context to make reasonable judgments about ephemera such as fashions in clothes, or recreational sex, or the million other practical circumstances of life.
For most of history, the few scattered bits of data that survive, poking through the clouds like mountain tops that are the only evidence from a plane that the ground exists, do not provide nearly a fine-grained enough picture to reconstruct what’s going on beneath the clouds.
Clearly, most clothing we see from any of these scattered bits was not purely functional. Clearly there is change over time, and regional variation, as one would see with fashion, but which could also be driven by changes in functional needs or available materials, or religious/ethnic changes, or who knows what other forces at work. But we don’t have a fine-grained enough data set to confidently identify the workings of what would point to today as “fashion” driving the changes we can see from most of history.
Which is a perfectly satisfactory and massively expected result. Ephemera change, and the details don’t matter. Most of what is lost in the mists of time is well lost.
piglet 03.02.11 at 8:52 pm
John Holbo 03.03.11 at 1:27 am
I think there certainly could be fashions in many things besides clothes, before 1700. First, there’s hair. But we can count that as clothes. More seriously, I would say that there were fashions in Greek art and drama and thought – just sticking with the Greek case. No doubt if I knew more about ancient China and India, I could speak to those cases as well. Fashion doesn’t have to be the lickety-split runway trendiness we know. It has to do with the pressure to make a certain amount of change for change’s sake, to make your thing the new thing. Because the new thing is attractive. Greek drama is on the line between fashion and custom. Custom meaning the steady-state thing that doesn’t change. There is change. Hence Aristophanes pining for the good old days of Aeschylus, staging that silly underworld drama competition in “The Frogs”. This isn’t a completely clear case, admittedly. Because you might say it’s a competition between two personal styles – Aeschylus and Euripides. But it’s played as though they are representatives of their generations. There is a style shift. I call that fashion.
Also, think about fashion in drama. Elizabethan theater. There’s a clear non-clothes case, pre-1700.
Kaveh 03.03.11 at 3:11 pm
Marco Polo @10’s comment, which seems like it might have been overlooked, is clearly talking about fashion and not style. That, with JH’s example from The Clouds, suggest that the existence of fashion is a pretty consistent feature of urban commercial society. I would think that the existence of large urban public spaces would be enough to guarantee the existence of fashion.
Kaveh 03.03.11 at 3:12 pm
Or rather, 10 is talking about fashion, not just style.
JohnTh 03.03.11 at 3:53 pm
If I remember my late Roman Republican sources correctly, there was evidence of both major and minor changes in clothing fashion over both years and centuries. Julius Caesar (and possibly Catalina) were mocked for having long sleeves which seems a matter of ‘style’. Cato the Younger on the other hand, was noted for wearing a toga without a tunic, something that had not been the fashion for very many years.
In both cases I believe that the more ‘modern’ forms of dress were Greek in origin, and that in general, changes in Roman fashion tended to involve adoption of items of dress from elsewhere, which would tend to support Kaveh’s thought @45 that extensive trade together with urban spaces, might almost inevitably spark a degree of variance over time in fashions.
French Uncle 03.04.11 at 5:02 pm
To myles #12, and #13, and, and …
Dedicated to you.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xtr08_boris-vian-je-suis-snob_fun
And for the others, a practical example of fashion to judge if and how changed in the last 50 years.
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