January 18, 2008
Fashioning history
 The high roll hairstyle and elaborate costume of the 1770s is shown in this 1778 French fashion plate of a “young lady of quality.” (From: Wikimedia Commons) |
Anna Green Winslow was living in Boston in 1772, but if revolution was in the air, it didn’t make it into her journals. Anna was 12 years old and longing for a “tasty head Dress,” all powder and curls and artificial hair, like the modish styles in London fashion plates.
One day, she finally had her hair dressed in the towering style, which doubled the height of her head. Unfortunately, it itched. What’s more, her family teased her about it.
Meanwhile in Philadelphia, a belle named Sarah Eve was having her own trouble with the high roll, as the hairstyle was called. It took hours to create, but was easily mussed when she was kissed.
Those stories from daily life in the 1770s catch the attention of historian Kate Haulman. A cultural historian who focuses on the early American period, she is intrigued by what fashion reveals about the social and political context of long-gone times.
Haulman, left, is not a fashion historian. She can certainly tell a stiff 1770s gown with its wide panniers from the loose, high-waisted gowns that first appeared in the 1790s and are still known as “Empire” gowns. But her interest in fashion emerged from her interest in gender, class, and a desire to understand the culture of the past.
What did it mean to wear certain clothes? What did it signify for the person wearing it, and how was that message received and interpreted by other people? After all, when people choose their outfits, it’s not a simple matter of keeping out the cold. They’re identifying themselves with a group, and potentially putting themselves at odds with others who might look askance at their choice.
It’s those tensions in meaning that fascinate Haulman. Her research has opened a window, for instance, on revolutionary Philadelphia, where the city’s struggle to define itself as both a sophisticated capital and the seat of revolution was marked by a culture war, said Haulman, that “pitted calls for republican simplicity” against the lure of ruffles, silk, and conspicuous consumption.
Then there were the army camps, where soldiers were banned from dressing their hair in the dandyish “macaroni” style, heavy with powder and perfumed oil and seen as unmilitary. Yet fashionable young men resisted, she found. And at any rate, the culture saw little contradiction between masculinity and powdering the hair—even with flour, if powder was lacking. To Sarah Eve, powder was “priming” to a soldier’s manly looks.
Haulman’s interest in the eighteenth century developed, in a sense, by living it. She grew up partly in Williamsburg. Her mother used to sweep through the door in full colonial garb, since she was a law student with a part-time job as a costume-clad interpreter at the Wythe House.
“I think it’s not an accident I work on the eighteenth century,” Haulman says.
Yet it wasn’t until a book fell open by chance that clothing began to intrigue her. It happened on a rather discouraging day. Haulman had planned to do her doctoral dissertation on the evolution of the wedding industry and had collected piles of the books on the topic in her library carrel: coffee table books, costume history, everything she could find that dealt with weddings.
But when she proposed the idea to her advisor, the advisor gently brought up a problem. The wedding industry really didn’t begin to evolve until the nineteenth century. So if Haulman wrote her dissertation on it, she’d be tagged, on the job market, as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century historian.
Like all historians, Haulman enjoys the whole sweep of history, but there’s one period that has captured her heart. For her, that was the colonial period. If she wanted to teach early American history, she’d need to stay in that period for her dissertation.
 Fashion had changed drastically by 1800, and women wore clothing inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. (From Wikimedia Commons) |
“I kind of dejectedly went back to my carrel in the library,” she recalls. As she cleared off the table, a book flipped open to an image of a high-waist gown from the 1790s. By the image was a brief label: “Transitional Period.”
“I thought, ‘What does that mean—transitional? What kind of transition? Sartorial? Political?’” Curious, she began to do more research. Soon, she was immersed in a fascinating moment in time that bridged the colonial period and the nineteenth century, when the world was changing and people were expressing those changes in what they bought and put on their bodies.
The transition, in fact, was so radical and abrupt it was unprecedented in fashion history. Within a few topsy-turvy years, as one king was overthrown in America and another was beheaded in France, women abandoned the stylized hair and wide panniers of the ancien regime for filmy, free-flowing gowns modeled on a vision of Greece and Rome.
But how were those clothes perceived by their wearers, and the people who saw them on the street? In her research, Haulman has found a wealth of original sources—diaries, caricatures, newspaper articles—that provided clues.
One thing she has learned is not to assume that the way we view a costume today is the way it was seen at the time. For instance, during the American Revolution, Haulman found that women who wore the elaborate high roll that so entranced young Anna were sometimes condemned as too masculine.
To modern eyes, there is nothing manly about a fussy pile of powdered hair adorned with ribbons and feathers. But men in the 1770s spotted a similarity to the high military hats of the times, and didn’t like it one bit.
Those lofty hairstyles could also be seen as too Tory, not only because they were worn by European nobility, but because they relied on imports that patriots were urged to boycott. Like Gandhi two centuries later in India, the revolutionaries of early America called for the colonists to eschew British goods and spin their own cloth at home.
This, of course, required women to spend long hours at their spinning wheels, and then to wear the scratchy cloth. Not all women agreed to cooperate with this particular use of their energy and bodies. As Haulman has found, fashion can be used to make a political statement; but people can also reject the interpretation that others attempt to impose on their clothing choices.
Haulman joined AU’s history department this year after teaching at the University of Alabama and Ohio State. She is currently working on a book on fashion and power in eighteenth-century America, the time when 12-year-old Anna ventured out in her joke-inducing high roll and finally decided it wasn’t for her.
“Nothing,” Anna concluded, “renders a young person more amiable than virtue and modesty without the help of false hair, red cow tail, or D. the barber.”
Anna was finding her place in the world—and in 1772, as in 2008, she was doing it partly by dressing the part.
This 1794 caricature shows the reaction to the new fashions that were gaining popularity. (From Library of Congress)
