Pasts Imperfect (11.4.21)
Ancient Fashion, Modern Couture, and More
This week, Aimee Hinds discusses ancient fashion and modern couture. Then we delve into the role of AI in art history, Dune and recurring questions of the white savior narrative, a podcast on ancient disability, new ancient-world journals from Colin McCaffrey, and more…
Aimee Hinds is a PhD student researching intersectional possibilities in receptions of Greek mythology in popular culture. She has written about bad feminism in reception, the perpetuation of whiteness in modern visual classical reception, and fashion’s engagement with the ancient Mediterranean. Here she provides a short introduction to fashion history and antiquity:
The convergence of fashion, antiquity and reception is currently relatively well attended to – at least, in public-facing scholarship – largely due to the growing popularity and visibility of the ancient Mediterranean as inspiration for major fashion designers including Dolce and Gabbana, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, Maria Grazia Chiuri for Dior, Mary Katrantzou, and Louis Vuitton. Although fashion has always mined the ancient world for ideas, these contemporary engagements are further marked by their use of place and space to enhance the association between the clothes and their often classical influences.
Such engagements follow Dior’s 1951 photoshoot on the Acropolis (restaged earlier this year following the unveiling of Dior’s 2022 Cruise Collection at the Panathenaic Stadium), and raise a variety of topics for further investigation. These include questions around imperialism and colonialism, ownership over the past, and contestation of national boundaries, as well as fluctuating receptions of the above. (For further reading on these topics specific to Magna Graecia – a site significant to both Dolce & Gabbana and Dior’s Maria Chiuri – see Giovanna Ceserani’s Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology.)
The restaging of the Dior photoshoot alone illustrates the potential for fashion to promulgate false and sometimes damaging myths about antiquity, such as the denial of polychromy in sculpture. Luke Leitch made the explicit connection between antiquity, location and design in his review of Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Sartoria menswear show for Vogue. For a critical analysis of some of these fashion shows, see Fabien Bièvre-Perrin’s essay on D&G’s Alta Moda shows for Antiquipop or my own discussing D&G and Chanel for Eidolon.
Comme des Garçons’ use of braided lace-front wigs and an Egyptian-inspired collection by Chanel have provoked interrogation of the line between appreciation and appropriation, and of the problems with trying to detach aspects of modern cultures from those of the past. Katherine Blouin has further explored fashion’s appropriation of antiquity on the Everyday Orientalism blog, especially Egypt as it appears through an Orientalist and colonial lens. Blouin, Monica Hanna and Sarah Bond have also discussed the ramifications of the visual aesthetic of colonialism as fashion for Hyperallergic.
Of course, this is only one thread in the tapestry of modern fashion’s engagement with the ancient. It is equally worth studying modern styles’ reliance on specific shapes and motifs from ancient styles (especially Greek and Egyptian). For brief context regarding the characteristics of ancient dress that create the aesthetic of modern antiquity-inspired styles, see Harold Koda’s series of short articles for the MET’s Costume Institute, especially Classical Art and Modern Dress. Perhaps unsurprisingly, focus on ancient dress has pooled around particular regions and periods in which dress was either well-represented in visual and literary sources, or is still represented by extant textiles or evidence of production. However, scholarship on dress and fashion has also explored related issues of the uses of clothing for gifting (Rollason 2016) and as part of religious activity and cultic ritual (Brøns 2017; Upson-Saia 2014).
For scholarship on ancient dress, a solid interdisciplinary overview covering a variety of methodologies including archaeological, literary and theoretical approaches to dress between 500 BCE and 800 CE can be found in Mary Harlow’s edited volume A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in Antiquity (although ‘antiquity’ here refers specifically to the Greco-Roman worlds). For a wider geographical focus, see Textiles and Gender in Antiquity : From the Orient to the Mediterranean, edited by Mary Harlow, Cecile Michel, and Louise Quillien. On Greek dress, see Mireille Lee’s monograph Body, Dress and Identity in Ancient Greece; for the Ancient Near East, see Textile Terminologies in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean from the Third to the First Millennia BC edited by Cecile Michel and Marie-Louise Nosch. There is a huge amount of scholarship on Roman and Late Antique dress; Judith Sebasta and Larissa Bonfante’s influential volume The World of Roman Costume makes a great starting point, along with Kelly Olson’s complementary monographs on feminine and masculine dress (2008; 2017). These works are just a starting point to the study of various aspects of fashion and dress in antiquity.
Further reading:
Brøns, Cecilie. Gods and Garments: Textiles in Greek Sanctuaries in the 7th to the 1st Centuries BC. Oxbow Books, 2017.
Edmondson, J. C. and Keith, Alison, eds. Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture. University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Gilhus, Ingvild Sælid. Clothes and Monasticism in Ancient Christian Egypt : A New Perspective on Religious Garments. Routledge, 2021.
Harlow, Mary, ed. Dress and Identity. University of Birmingham IAA Interdisciplinary Series: Studies in Archaeology, History, Literature and Art (2). Archaeopress, 2012.
Nosch, Marie-Louise, Zhao Feng, and Lotika Varadarajan, eds. Global Textile Encounters. Oxbow Books, 2014.
Olson, Kelly. Dress and the Roman Woman: Self-Presentation and Society. Routledge, 2008.
Olson, Kelly. Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity. Routledge, 2017.
Pennick Morgan. Faith, Dress and Personal Appearance in Late Antiquity. Brill, 2018.
Rollason, Nikki. Gifts of Clothing in Late Antique Literature. Routledge, 2016.
Upson-Saia, Kristi. Early Christian Dress: Gender, Virtue, and Authority. Routledge, 2014.
Upson-Saia, Kristi, Daniel-Hughes, Carly, and Batten, Alicia J., eds. Dressing Judaeans and Christians in Antiquity. Routledge, 2014
The Ancient World on the Web
Check out television critic James Poniewozik’s review in The New York Times of Netflix’s new show Yasuke and its reclamation of the medieval history of Black samurais. Then read Warren A. Stanislaus’ essay, “The Significance of Yasuke, the Black Samurai,” in Black Perspectives. He notes:
While the Black Shogun and the Black Panther are compelling fantasies, the Black Samurai is a real-life story of a Black superhero who embodies the realization of an Afro-Asian solidarity. Herein lies Yasuke’s true symbolic potential for the 21st century.
At The Conversation, art historian Sonja Drimmer addresses “How AI is hijacking art history.” Should we be suspicious of all these headlines touting how AI has been used to “discover” artworks and solve supposed mysteries?
When AI gets attention for recovering lost works of art, it makes the technology sound a lot less scary than when it garners headlines for creating deep fakes that falsify politicians’ speech or for using facial recognition for authoritarian surveillance.
Over at the “You’re Dead to Me” podcast, Jane L. Draycott talks about disability in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean.
At Slate, Islamic studies professor Ali Karjoo-Ravary asks, “Is Dune a White Savior Narrative?” He notes that “Frank Herbert’s novel drew from Islam to critique the idea of the messianic Western man.” But does the movie do the same?
Even when the savior fails, destroys everything, and becomes a monster, his agency overrides that of everyone else and reduces them to side stories who are swept away in the terrific power of his myth. Everyone else who could have spoken but wasn’t allowed to becomes a mere accessory to a tragic coming-of-age story.
On the SCS Blog, Ximing Lu (陆西铭) discusses teaching the troubling Homeric Hymn to Demeter in his Classical Myth class and his personal journey from China to the U.S. on a 5-year-visa to pursue a classics PhD:
We — particularly Chinese graduate students in STEM fields — are hesitant to go home out of the fear that we may be denied re-entry to the U.S. and have to relinquish our τιμαί. We have lost our pomegranate seeds. Browsing through the visa section of 1point3acres, a popular online forum among the Chinese diaspora in North America, I felt I understood the Homeric Hymn to Demeter a little better.
ACLS President Joy Connolly has also revised her guide to going to graduate school in Classics: “Going on the Market...and What Comes Before.”
Lectures and conferences we’d attend
Tonight, grab a glass of wine and explore the ancient wine trade with Michael Dietler. Registration is here.
New Online Journal Issues curated by @YaleClassicsLib
Histoire Épistémologie Langage Vol. 43, No. 1 (2021) La grammaire grecque étendue #openaccess
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 36, No. 3 (September 2021) NB: “Digital cultural colonialism: measuring bias in aggregated digitized content held in Google Arts and Culture” by Inna Kizhner, et al.
Revue des Études Byzantines Vol. 79 (2021) NB: “Some Observations on Tree Protection in Roman and Byzantine Law” by Daphne Penna
Journal of the History of Philosophy Vol. 59, No. 4 (October 2021)
Journal of Late Antiquity Vol. 14, No. 2 (Fall 2021) NB: “Sailors and Circus Partisans: Piracy, Dockyard Brawls and Empire-wide Networks of Communication” by Janet Wade
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Vol. 103, No. 3 (2021) NB: “Damascius on Self-Constituted Realities” by Marilena Vlad
Classical Antiquity Vol. 40 , No. 2 (October 2021) NB: “Roman Climate Awareness in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History” by Jane Millar
Pitches
The Public Books section "Antiquities" continues to take pitches for articles to be published in early 2022. You can also pitch to our “Pasts Imperfect” column at the LA Review of Books using this form. Thanks for reading!
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