Dress, Status, and Identity in the Philippines: Pineapple Fiber Cloth and Ilustrado Fashion

Abstract

Piña cloth signaled the epitome of luxury, refinement, and wealth in nineteenth-century Philippines. Woven from the delicate threads of the fiber of the pineapple plant in a labor-intensive process that produced only half an inch a day in the nineteenth century to a meter a day today, it was a textile unique to the Philippines. This article analyzes the connections between cloth, dress, status, class, and national identity from the nineteenth-century Spanish colonial era to the present. It argues that Piña was connected to the identity of the Ilustrado class and links the decline of Piña as “high fashion” with the rise of new elites with new dress and consumption practices.