A fashionable legacy

A young person’s view: A fashionable legacy

By Ellen Molnar, Look Again Project team member.

I’d like to start this with a blanket disclaimer: I absolutely adore clothes.

Putting together outfits, matching jewellery and makeup, picking what shoes and jacket to wear: I love all of this and it’s probably the reason I’m never ready in time in the morning. Finding an excellent outfit or a piece that’s exactly your taste is exciting, because fashion is the most basic and external form of self-expression.  It is integral to our identities.

However, aside from my personal love of good clothes, fashion is important because it’s a tool. Just as what people wear now show things about them, fashion of the past is vital to understanding the world that a piece came from.

There are the obviously indicators, like how it can be used to examine class, but it is deeper than that. For hundreds of years silk from China was shipped across Asia to the great cities of Persia and Rome, down into India and, eventually, into Western Europe and across the rest of the world. The desire of people to have silk for making their clothes helped enable historians to establish the interconnectedness of the medieval and ancient worlds, to track patterns of wealth and shifting centres of power. Trading in silk made people astronomically rich. It wasn’t the only thing which gave an incentive for pan-Eurasian trade, but it was a powerful one. The desire for nice clothes, essentially, pushed people together and eventually spread culture and ideas along with the material and spices, helping to shape the world we live in today.

It bears remembering that the continental trade of the past which eventually opened up the richness of Asia to Europeans led to a desire for material things and the money to buy them which ultimately led to brutal colonialism and a horrific destruction of indigenous peoples, the effects of which are still far too evident in our society. But the consequences of the blind consumption and greed of the past are vital for understanding the world today (isn’t all history?) and fashion had a role to play in that. So, fashion is important not only because it shaped the world in a positive way, helping along the exchange of ideas, but also because it contributed to an imperial legacy it would to terrible to forget. Fashion, as the Look Again Project’s tag goes, shapes history, and it is a history we must remember.

Recently I’ve been reading The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan, a book which looks at the ideas I’ve discussed here in much more detail. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to find out more. And despite the heavy weight of the legacy of the desire for good clothes- one which continues in the dreadful environmental impact of fast fashion- the clothes of the past really were something, weren’t they? One must appreciate their beauty and learn the stories behind them, because they make up a part of history as rich as anything from a chronicle or manuscript.

Displaying fashion items in galleries like the one at the museum is important enables people to find out about the artefacts and start to build up an understanding of how they fit into the wider narrative I’ve talked about already. In the collection at the museum, for example, is a dress which a Russian princess made before she moved to Paris. It’s a gorgeous dress, but it also tells us some important things once you begin to ask questions about the story behind it. Why was a princess making a dress herself?

Because she had become a seamstress. Why had she become a seamstress? Because she had had to flee Russia during the Revolution. Why Paris? Most of the nobility in Russia at the time spoke French as a main language, which could provide a reason. In this way you can begin to examine the context of the items and learn more about the past they form a part of, but only if you have access to the things that open up the conversation. Museum collections, therefore, are vital for historians doing research and for the general public, who can start to do some research themselves.