Southeast Asia has an exceptionally rich textile history, and weaving has developed into a high art form in the wider region. The imagination and creativity that one finds reflected in the making of cloth, its detailed patterning and overall design, is equal in aesthetic quality to artistic forms that usually are associated with the more conventionally recognized visual arts of a culture, such as painting and sculpture. Cloth was and is first of all used to dress the human body. For this reason, it is also evident that textile production and design connect to a long history of change: what one may call a history of fashion. But textiles also have an unusually deep cultural significance in the region. They play an essential part in many ceremonies and rituals, either as ostentatious displays or as part of offerings, and they often are essential in gift exchanges that establish and emphasize social relationships. Southeast Asia as a region has been on the crossroad of exchanges between West and East for millennia, with direct connections between South and East Asia resulting in a particularly fruitful mixture of Indigenous and outside social and religious ideas.

4000 embroidered qabā’s, 4000 ridā’s of silk lined with sable, mink and other furs, 10000 qamīses and ghilālas, 10000 khaftāns, 2000 pair of sirwal of different kinds, 4000 imāmas, 1000 hoods, 1000 capes of different kinds, 5000 kerchiefs of different kinds, 1000 special suits of armour, 50000 ordinary suits of armour, 10000 helmets, 4000 pair of khuff, most lined with sable, mink, and other furs, 4000 pair of jawrab.1

A garment covers, decorates, and renders its wearer distinct. This chapter focuses on this last function of clothing: distinction. I reflect on this characteristic by analysing changes in wardrobes of men and women during the European middle ages and the early modern period. I concentrate on the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, a period in which some sort of ‘philosophy’ of distinction – based on garments and accessories – affirmed itself. Yet this chapter highlights the existence of at least four different types of distinction: it starts with social distinction, perhaps the best-known meaning of the term; it continues with a consideration of distinction as applied to the body; and follows with a consideration of geographical distinction; the final part reflects on another well-known meaning of distinction that is still with us today – dress as a form of economic distinction.1

Until fairly recently, fashion was viewed as of little relevance to Chinese history. It was not until the late 1990s that scholars began to challenge the assumption, demonstrated to have originated with eighteenth-century reports from Western observers, that China lacked the phenomenon of fashion until it was introduced by the West in the early twentieth century.1 As BuYun Chen’s chapter in this volume discusses, these new studies of fashion in historical China were part of a wider trend to contest the association between fashion, Western modernity, and capitalism. This scholarship spanned cultural history, literature studies, and museum exhibitions, but it shared a desire to look to new sources, rather than echo the court-issued and official texts that charted regulation and control.2 Scholars began to discuss vernacular and commercial texts that revealed histories of women and merchants, of entertainment and trade.3 Most of all, historians began to look beyond regulated court dress objects like rank badges and dragon robes, which had long fascinated Western collectors, to diverse objects including photographs, vernacular paintings, and prints, thus moving the field away from twentieth-century connoisseurship accounts.4

In his pioneering studies on the longue durée in the Indian Ocean world, K. N. Chaudhuri stressed the dynamism of dress in this vast region, finding in some instances ‘all the ingredients for high fashion’.1 He forcefully argued for revising Fernand Braudel’s earlier conclusions, based on studies of the greater Mediterranean, that fashion originated in (and was exclusive to) Europe.2 Although not immediately ‘intelligible or accessible to outsiders’, wrote Chaudhuri, the ‘dress habits of the people of the Indian Ocean changed’.3 The basic garment shape or silhouette might endure over time, but those-in-the-know gauged fashionability in subtle modifications of cut, length, pleating, and, above all, in details of fibre, fabric, and ornamentation. Sumptuary laws and cultural norms strongly guided garment choice in many times and places, but even so, dress was continually modified as a powerful signifier of status and allegiance, further open to ‘expressions of individual tastes and preferences’.4

Over the twentieth century, multi-disciplinary academic studies addressed dress practice and bodily adornment from a variety of perspectives, assessing the question of fashion, though few communities outside the West were awarded this term until the past generation. Anthropologists took an ethnographic stance, with works that from the late 1980s became more attentive to the lived significance of clothing that reflected ‘agency, practice and performance’ with local and global impact.

In the 1580s Japan began to extricate itself from a barely imaginable 100-year civil war. Fighting had not been continuous, nor everywhere, but bloodshed had been prevalent enough to form what has been called a ‘culture of civil war’.1 The capital, Kyoto (kyōto means ‘capital’) was reduced to ruins. Its historic grid had been wiped away. The sovereign, ancestor of today’s emperor of Japan, had long since ceased to enjoy his ancient titles, and was known metonymically merely as ‘the palace’, though in truth, he was as likely to be lodging in a warlord’s mansion. People at the time defined their world as gekokujō, ‘those below overthrowing those above’ – the literal meaning of revolution.

The Atlantic Basin was the centre of vibrant commerce that included vast quantities of essential commodities such as textiles and clothing that influenced dress and consumer goods consumption throughout the region. The dress customs of the Atlantic world were characterized by enormous variety and complexities born out of commingling and migration of diverse groups of people. This blending was also part of a globalizing world in which capitalism and transformation in consumer culture gave rise to new identities and styles. Atlantic dress depicted differentiation and overlapping cultural influences that were by-products of local and global trade systems connecting people across several colonial empires. In the Atlantic Basin, for instance, many colonies relied on large imports of Indian cottons that were also traded in West and Central Africa in exchange for slaves needed to provide labour in plantation zones of the Americas. Consequently, the Atlantic world was influenced by wider intercontinental patterns and a burgeoning global economy.

These are the opening lines of a popular French song that has its roots in the Caribbean islands that were colonized by France.2 It is written from the perspective of a Creole woman who is expressing her grief as she realizes that her lover – presumably a white French sailor – has left the island. In the song there is a deliberate deployment of textile artefacts (foulard and Madras) as symbols of the loss that the woman experiences. She is not only sorry that her lover is leaving, but also lamenting that she will no longer have access to fine things like textiles and gold jewellery (collier choux), which were fashionable in the eighteenth century in the French Caribbean.

The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires are the focus of this chapter, which between them covered a stretch of Eurasia between Budapest and Murshidabad in Bengal (India). Royal magnificence is the lens through which I will assess the fashion dynamics of these imperial dynasties. The Ottoman realm included Southeastern Europe, with the capital city of Istanbul straddling the border between Europe and Asia. From 1516 to 1517, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria – in the broad and historical sense of the latter term – were part of the territory controlled by the sultans as well. Apart from the brief timespans during which the Safavids held Iraq, their realm corresponded roughly to present-day Iran and sections of Afghanistan. Other regions that today are part of Afghanistan, including Kabul, were part of the Mughal Empire, which had expanded first over the territories covered by today’s Pakistan and northern India. In the second half of the sixteenth century, moreover, Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) added the highly productive territories of Bengal and Gujarat to his realm. About a hundred years later, Aurangzeb (r.

In early fourteenth-century Egypt a new fashion spread: women began wearing qamīş (loose robes) with sleeves up to three ells wide that could cost as much as several months of a worker’s salary. In 1350–1 the vizier ordered that such sleeves should be cut and that these garments should no longer be produced. It is said that images of women who had been executed for wearing the forbidden garment were posted on the ramparts of Cairo as a warning. Yet a generation later, in the 1390s, wide sleeves were back in fashion and the new vizier forbade them once again as visible signs of decadence.

Can it have been merely by coincidence that the future was to belong to the societies fickle enough to care about changing the colours, materials, and shapes of costume, as well as the social order and the map of the world – societies, that is, which were ready to break with their traditions? There is a connection.1

What (not) to wear? A mirza should never wear brocade or cloth of gold; these are beneath his dignity, intended for adorning domestic spaces, not the body. In winter, a shawl – plain or imprinted with gold and silver leaves – would keep out the cold over garments of Indian material fastened with pearl buttons, ‘for pearl is natural while other jewels have to be cut’. In summer, ‘when he sits on a wooden seat with a white covering, he should wear the silver-threaded cap round the head and ears […] and a silver threaded upper garment (bala-band)’.1 From its initial use as a title for princes or noblemen, mirza had become the watchword of (courtly) refinement, denoting a gentlemanly bearing by the seventeenth century. Flushed with cash through burgeoning trade, the Mughal Empire reached its zenith; home to an increasingly cosmopolitan nobility whose ranks had increased rapidly, an expanding population of theologians and administrators, and a prosperous mercantile elite.