Textiles and Fiber Arts as Catalysts for Ideas

Belts, cloaks, kilts—the earliest garments depicted—are mere wraparounds. The Egyptians are the first on record to think of sewing up cloth into a permanently formed dress, in their case a tube for the torso, held up by a strap over one or both shoulders and forming a sort of jumper (Figs. 10 and 11a). The earliest preserved body garment we possess is a First Dynasty linen shirt (c. 3100 B.C.E.) in which the idea of tubes has already been taken further to include sleeves (Figs. 11b and 12). Where one would expect the narrow supporting straps, two long rectangles of cloth were added, sewn up along the edges to form tube sleeves.

In the Near East, on the other hand, people seem to have worked from the concept of a garment hung from the shoulders. When they began sewing up clothes, rather than draping them anew with each wearing, they cut a neck hole in the middle of the cloth and sewed up the sides, eventually adding two tubes for sleeves (Fig. 11c). Our first extant example of this garment type was found in Tutankhamen's (c. 1370–1352 B.C.E.) tomb (though details show it to be a Syrian import). This general design, improved by opening the front for easy donning (Fig. 11d), was destined to survive till today as our basic upper garment. Our oldest examples of this construction occur on magnificently preserved Caucasoid mummies from the deserts of central Asia from 1000 B.C.E.

These same immigrants also preserve our first examples of another clever use of cloth tubes: trousers, invented shortly before 1000 B.C.E. by Eurasian horsemen for protection while riding horseback (Fig. 13). Again, this clothing design has come down to us as one of our basic garments.

As textile technology progressed, who wore what often became strictly codified. In Egypt, only the pharaoh folded his kilt with the left lappet on top; in Rome, only the emperor could wear a garment entirely of purple, and only noble citizens a purple stripe. This meant the viewer could read rank and station from another's costume, even, in some cases, down to the last degree. In China, for example, officials of all types sewed onto their robes fair-sized rectangular emblem-patches, known as rank badges, that specified their exact rank and position in the governmental hierarchy. (The highest emblem was the dragon, which only the emperor could wear.) Aztec warriors, for their part, displayed their degree of prowess in battle as special emblems on their cloaks. Less formally, but just as rigidly, European folk dress evolved in such a way that the knowledgeable viewer could look at a village woman's garb and determine that, for example, the wearer had reached puberty, was a Christian rather than Muslim or Jewish, was not particularly wealthy, came from a certain village or locality, and was a skilled and diligent worker. The elements that conveyed this information accrued one by one over twenty thousand years, to the point that the costume represents multiple layers of walking history.

Figure 10. Egyptian textile workers (right to left: spinner, flax-splicer, overseer, two weavers squatting beside horizontal ground loom). Mural in tomb of Khnumhotep, Beni Hassan; Twelfth Dynasty (early 2nd millennium B.C.E.). THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, ROGERS FUND, 1933 (33.8.16) PHOTOGRAPH, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Although much of this kind of information could be read from nineteenth-century traditional dress throughout Eurasia, the same could not be said in England, for an interesting reason. There the nobility habitually gave its cast-off clothing to the servants and tenant farmers, a practice that increasingly obscured an observer's ability to determine someone's standing by clothing alone, although poor fit, fraying edges, and outmoded fashion would give clues. Consequently there is no English "peasant costume" as in other parts of Europe. In this way, although court dress at the top of the scale was highly controlled, dress in the lower classes became more democratic, a trait that, to some extent, moved to North America with the colonists. In the early twenty-first century, the farther west you go across the United States, the less dress and its potential signals of status matter to many people. On West Coast college campuses it can be hard to tell students from professors, and at the Los Angeles Opera you may see everything from tuxedos and jeweled evening gowns to blue jeans—and running shoes on both sexes. For the middle class, at least, what you wear during leisure time is more a function of how you feel that day than of how you wish others to perceive you. If anything, the Bronze Age idea of telling people your social rank through dress has been emphatically rejected, and westerners will complain about easterners' "class consciousness."

The same people, however, still send messages through the textiles they choose to wear by selecting them according to their personalities—within, of course, the general mores of their culture. Pluck them out of Los Angeles and drop them into, say, Ankara or Turfan, and their clothing readily signals their cultural origin.

Handmade textiles, too, have always had a personal element. Those who wove, embroidered, or knotted pile for home use are repeatedly documented as taking the attitude, "If I'm going to put this much work in, and use it all my life, I want it to look the way I want it to look." Hence no two rugs or aprons or blouses looked alike: the traditional was simultaneously personal.