A Real Folk Treasure

Sharp-eyed readers will find a new blog in my "Costume Blogs" list in the left-hand margin: FolkCostume&Embroidery (the title is written without spaces on the blog's home page).  

FolkCostume&Embroidery consists of hundreds of article-length posts showing folk costumes from different parts of Europe and Asia.  Each is illustrated almost entirely with color photographs of costumes, diagrams, maps, and other useful illustrations.  Best of all, the articles often cite source material at the end.  The author embroiders and sews costumes himself, and the blog states that he is "open to requests to research and transmit information on particular Costumes for dance groups, choirs, etc."

Readers of the blog who are interested in folk costume should come and explore.  Chances are that the area you need information on will be featured, and there is a search box for the blog you can use.  I suspect I don't have enough time just to read all of the wonderful articles that are here, but that won't stop me from trying! 

From The "Nothing New Under the Sun" Department

Afghan man wearing a pakol

Boy wearing a clock, boots, and kausia.
Terracotta, made in Athens, 300 BCE

This evening, I was reading an Osprey text about the armies of Macedonia after the death of Alexander the Great, when I saw artists' images showing Macedonian army members wearing an odd kind of beret.  

I thought I recognized the beret.  It looked like a hat J. Peterman was selling in its upscale catalog back in the 1990s, which it labeled an "Afghan hat."  Nowadays, you can buy similar hats today on the Internet for as low as $9.99 USD; Amazon.com and Ebay sell such hats from various suppliers for prices ranging from about $15 USD to $30 USD.

When I attempted to find material on the Internet to confirm, or refute, my recollection, I came upon this Wikipedia article about a modern Afghan hat called a "pakol." Included with the article were two photographs from Wikimedia Commons (both featured here), one of a modern pakol, and one of an ancient Greek sculpture, showing a boy wearing a visually identical hat, which the Greeks and Macedonians called a kausia.  This style of hat originally was made as a woolen bag, with a bottom just a bit larger in circumference than the top. The bag is then rolled up until the hat is the right depth to sit comfortably on the head, and the larger bottom forms a kind of brim that lies above the rolled-up "headband." It is possible to tweak the circumference of the band by rolling or unrolling the bag.

At least some modern Afghans claim that Alexander introduced the hat to Nuristan and that there are modern Nuristans who are descendants of Alexander's troops. However, the actual adoption and wearing of the pakol in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and nearby areas today appears to date from the 20th century.

Back in the 1980s scholars debated whether Alexander's army introduced the kausia to Afghanistan and nearby regions, or whether he adopted the hat from the peoples there. One historical blogger summarizes the scholarly debate over the pakol's origins as follows:

It began with an article in American Journal of Archaeology in 1981, “The Cap that Survived Alexander”, in which Prof. Bonnie Kingsley made the arresting observation that the pakool closely resembles an ancient item of headwear, the kausia (καυσία)....

In 1986 Kingsley’s article received an academic response, and quite a decisive one. In Transactions of the American Philological Association Ernst Fredricksmeyer, an Alexander specialist, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the kausia was just too established a staple of the Macedonian wardrobe for it to have been imported from Central Asia toward the end of Alexander’s campaigns. ....

The debate between Kingsley and Fredricksmeyer rumbled on for a while ..., with Fredricksmeyer latterly slightly less confident about any connection between the pakool and Alexander the Great. The coup de grâce was administered by Willem Vogelsang of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden (under the not-so-catchy title of “The Pakol, a distinctive but apparently not so very old headgear from the Indo-Iranian borderlands”), who showed that the pakool is actually a simple adaptation of caps with rolled rims worn all over the borderlands of China, India and Central Asia.

But the resolution of the academic debate does not tell us where or why the pakol (or pakool) re-emerged.  If the cap was adapted from similar types of cap in Central Asia, why did it take the old Macedonian form?   Surely there are other forms such a woolen cap could take?  Maybe the answer is just as Vogelsang suggests; that an adjustable wool cap is ideal for fighters and military men in mountain country.  Though in a way, it seems a little odd that there isn't more continuity of use of the cap from Alexander's time and today, since in many ways life in the Central Asian mountains hasn't changed all that much in the past two millennia.

Whatever the reason, the existence of the pakol today is a minor boon for Alexandrine period reenactors, who can easily find a genuine-looking hat for their kit for a reasonable price.  Alexander's men appear to have worn the kausia in white, and undyed white wool pakol are among those easily available on the Internet.  If you want a pakol simply for style, black, brown, tan, and gray are also available.

Folk Costume--Nuts and Bolts

From Franco Rios on the HistoricKnit Yahoo list, I learned about this fascinating blog: Folk Costume & Embroidery. Unlike the Folklore Fashion site I blogged about back in November, Folk Costume & Embroidery often goes into detail about how a particular costume is made and ornamented, with lovely illustrative pictures!

It's worth noting that learning the details of some of these costumes may be giving important clues as to when the costume began to solidify into a "folk" costume instead of remaining living fashion wear.  For example, in this entry, the blogger reveals that an important element of Provençal folk costume is finely quilted decorative skirts--a mainstay of 18th century costume. This entry, in contrast, shows underclothing that clearly resembles fashionable women's underclothing of the mid-19th century (take special note of the straight, short, almost sleeveless chemise and pantalettes). Though I'm not interested in folk costume for its own sake, I find these historical trace elements fascinating. I'm looking forward to exploring the site further and commend it to my readers with congruent interests.

More Eye Candy

For those who enjoy seeing lovely photographs of colorful folk costumes, I have another treat: Duran Textiles' blog Folklore Fashion. This blog features photographs of modern-day wearers of folk costume in the Scandinavian countries. The latest post features some beautiful Sami costumes. If you enjoyed the costumes from the Lithuanian Folk Costume calendar in my last post, this page is for you.

The Lithuanian Folk Costume Calendar 2012-2013

Back cover

Front cover

The Lithuanian Folk Costume Calendar that I had ordered from BalticShop.com arrived late last week.  It  was packed loosely rolled up with bubble wrap in a box.  Our local mail carrier thoughtfully set the box right squarely in the middle of the doormat, where I involuntarily stepped on it as I was leaving my house  that afternoon. (Fortunately, I didn't place my full weight on the box, and it seems to have lost any disfiguring creases after hanging on the wall awhile.)

This calendar follows a similar format to the calendar of recreations of early Lithuanian costume that the Lithuanian Folk Costume Center published for 2010-2011, which I wrote about here. Each month of the new calendar has a large, full-length photograph of one or more people in costume along with the actual calendar portion (on the bottom tenth of the page), and the back of each page contains explanatory text in English and Lithuanian along with smaller photographs of particular portions of the costumes.

When most people (including me) think of European "folk costume" they think of garments that look more or less like the clothing on this page; colorful, charming, festive, but impractical looking and hard for the untrained eye to distinguish from folk costume of any other nation in Europe. The costumes in this calendar are equally festive, but they also show garments that look comfortable, and could have been worn on a daily basis instead of just being festival wear. They also show headwear that bears a distinctive resemblance to some of the recreations of early period Lithuanian costume (though that might just mean that the reconstructors assumed that some of the draped veils of folk costume were early period survivals).

January

December

November

October

Some of the costumes show clear influence from fashionable European costume from one or more periods during the Victorian era. This is particularly obvious in the frock-coat-style garments worn by the few men featured in the calendar. The women's clothing also show such influence, however.  For example, some of the women's costumes have the very high waists that were popular during the first decade of the 19th century CE, while others sport the bold plaids that were fashionable in mid-Victorian costume.

Space and intellectual property considerations keep me from photographing the entire calendar front and back, and I'm not much of a photographer anyway, but even these poor photographs should give you an idea of whether this calendar is worth your money. (If you click on them, you will be rewarded with a much larger and clearer view of the image.)  BalticShop.com is charging $25.00 USD for the calendar, and if you are located in the continental United States shipping is $3.95 USD; I don't know what the shipping rates are for other locations.

I am very pleased with the calendar, despite my relative lack of interest in 19th century costume, because the images are so large and beautiful. I have never before seen so many different and flattering styles of coats in one place! My only regret is that I didn't know about this amazing calendar at the beginning of 2012.  If anyone who reads this has other questions about this calendar and the information it contains, please ask.

Where's the Aberration?

I've been doing more thinking about the information from Nørre Sandegård Vest, particularly the information suggesting that the Scandinavian apron dress of the Vendel and Viking period may have been a kind of uniform reflecting the woman's status and affiliation with a particular "tribe"  and not an individual fashion choice.

The picture that is emerging of relative uniformity of apron dress colors and and accompanying jewelry over time reminds me of is late (e.g., 18th through early 20th century) period European folk costume. Dresses and overdresses in this era, such as the bunad, tended to be limited to particular styles and colors among people living in a particular region, and tended to differentiate between married and unmarried marital status.  Perhaps the Vendel/Viking apron dress was a garment reflective of married women's status, that varied in style primarily depending upon the region in Scandinavia in which the woman was living. (Tortoise brooches, in contrast, seem to have evolved into standardized patterns that appeared wherever "Viking" women settled.)

The suggestion that Scandinavian women's costume changed little from the Vendel period through to the end of the Viking era raises another question. I've read scholars (names are not coming to mind right now) who suggest that fashion, as we know it--i.e., short-term social trends affecting the appearance of individualized outfits--did not appear in Europe until the 15th century and is not typically found in other parts of the world until after their first contact with Europeans. In other words, what we think of as "folk costume" is typical of clothing changes before the age of "fashion", and the invention of "fashion" is an abrupt aberration from the pattern of slow, status-oriented clothing style change that was the norm for most of recorded history.

All of this idle speculation will be knocked into a cocked hat, of course, if it turns out that the apron dress finds that have been analyzed so far are not  "typical." But right now it is easier to assemble a picture of apron-dress wearing Viking women as flaunting a "tribal" affiliation as their descendants would do with later-period folk dress than to match the existing finds to an image of Viking fashion as based primarily upon individual expression, in the manner of Renaissance European clothing.   I suspect that we eventually will have enough finds to be able to say, with as much confidence as is possible about the distant past, that Viking women likely wore similar dark blue or brown apron dresses with stylistic differences characteristic of the region in which they lived, or something similar. When that happens, I guess I will have to find another use, or another home, for all of the red, orange, green, and pastel apron dresses I have made.