National Dress Research Articles

On national dress and the problem of authenticity in Ulysses

ABSTRACTThis article considers James Joyce’s representation of Irish dress, arguing that his ambivalent treatment of it accurately reflects his fractious relationship with the Irish Revival movement. The article begins with a discussion of the metaphor of performance and relates this to issues around “authenticity”. From here, it discusses Douglas Hyde’s thoughts on dress, as presented in “The Necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland”, contextualising these within a brief history of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Irish dress history, and recognising the important work of women in this. Assessing Joyce’s depictions of Irish dress, especially in “Scylla and Charybdis”, “Cyclops” and “Circe”, this article argues that Joyce sees Irish dress as a contingent and fragile cultural performance.

Women’s Perspective on the Surakarta Kebaya based on Biographies of Gusti Noeroel and Utami Suryadarma

The kebaya is a national dress for Indonesian women. This paper analyzes the development of the Surakarta kebayas used by Gusti Noeroel, a princess who lived in Mangkunegara Palace, and Utami Suryadarma, the daughter of a high rank police officer from Surakarta. They were selected as the subject of this research because they used the kebaya consistently throughout their lives despite their interaction with modern culture. This study used a historical approach, especially on women’s position in Indonesian society and the development of Indonesian culture and kebaya design. The data were collected from various publications. Gusti Noeroel and Utami Suryadarma were educated noblewomen. They interacted with modern culture from various nations, while consistently using the kebaya as a characteristically Indonesian dress. The model they initially wore, the Surakarta kebaya , developed by changing the collar and the length and by applying a tighter fitting design. In addition, the material used changed according to the times. We can conclude that these princesses’ abilities to adjust the kebaya according to each era, made their kebaya designs always up to date.

New Looks On Abaya as National Identity of United Arab Emirates

This research discusses the new looks on the abaya which is being part of national identity in the United Arab Emirates and even more widely, abaya was accepted as an Arab culture by fashion lovers all over the world. The government boost preservation of abaya that already becomes a lifestyle of Arabs women by assigning this robe as the national dress. This research uses the qualitative method by using fashion theory from Douglas who said that anxiety is a source of fashion changes. This study shows that fashion changes due to anxiety and wants to bring change or replace it with a new one. In the United Arab Emirates, the changes of fashion occur because the citizens want to set the abaya to be timeless culture. New looks on abaya bring out the question; How government and individuals protecting abaya from fashion changes in United Arab Emirate? The result of this study is line with the concept of Douglas about fashion; that fashion are created not only to validate or display dominant and accepted categories of identity, but also to out cultural anxiety.The changes that had already done by UAE people not only bring to the "new" UAE, but it was for preservasing culture and history of UAE.

Lace and knitting in the national dress of hutsuls of Rakhivshchyna in the end of XIX – the beginning of the XX century: local peculiarities

Lace and knitting in the national dress of hutsuls of Rakhivshchyna in the end of XIX – the beginning of the XX century: local peculiarities

Through Belgian Eyes: Charlotte Brontë's Troubled Brussels Legacy by Helen MacEwan

Reviewed by: Through Belgian Eyes: Charlotte Brontë's Troubled Brussels Legacy by Helen MacEwan Amber Pouliot (bio) Review of Helen MacEwan, Through Belgian Eyes: Charlotte Brontë's Troubled Brussels Legacy (Eastbourne: Sussex University Press, 2018) 258 pages, ISBN 978-1-84519-910-4 Between February 1842 and January 1844, Charlotte Brontë lived, studied, and worked at the Pensionnat de Demoiselles Heger-Parent, in Brussels. Much has been written about the impact of this continental sojourn on Brontë's literary development, which is especially evident in her two Belgian novels, The Professor (her first-written novel, completed in 1846 but published posthumously in 1857) and Villette (1853). There has also been a great deal of (often salacious) speculation regarding the nature of Brontë's relationship with Constantin Heger, her literary professor and the husband of her employer, Zoë Heger. Helen MacEwan's engaging and informative new book, Through Belgian Eyes: Charlotte Brontë's Troubled Brussels Legacy, offers readers something entirely original, redirecting our focus to consider Charlotte's impact on Brussels and the Belgians, tracing her reception from the first French translations of her novels, in the mid-nineteenth century, to the present day. MacEwan's book will, of course, be of interest to Brontë fans and scholars, as well as those with a more general interest in the family, especially now during their bicentenaries from 2016–2020. Written in an accessible style and featuring a timeline of Brontë's reception in Belgium (including translations of her novels, the publication dates of influential biographies, and the release dates of film adaptations), it will be useful to undergraduates and postgraduates studying Brontë and her literary legacy. But it includes so much fresh material that it will also be immensely useful to scholars researching and teaching the Brontës. Through Belgian Eyes also offers a fascinating history of Brussels in its own right, focusing on the period of Brontë's residence but extending from 1830, when Belgium gained its independence from the Netherlands, to the present. For this reason, the book will appeal to readers with even a general interest in the long nineteenth century or in Belgian history [End Page 320] and culture. Over fourteen chapters, an introduction, and conclusion, MacEwan paints a remarkably vivid picture of Brussels society, covering such varied topics as its religious expression and fondness for pageantry, its rigidly stratified class system and extremes of wealth and poverty, its political climate and expressions of patriotism, and its national character and cultural productions. Among its many virtues, MacEwan's book is richly illustrated. It features more than seventy images, ranging from landscapes and cityscapes to pictures of citizens in Belgian national dress, portraits and photographs of prominent people, maps, reproductions of paintings, and illustrations of many streets and buildings that are no longer in existence due to a relentless process of urban development and renewal. As MacEwan demonstrates, the Brussels of today would be nearly unrecognizable to the Brontës; the Pensionnat Heger-Parent, the Rue Isabelle, the Protestant Cemetery, and many of the streets that Charlotte and Emily traversed have all been razed in order to make way for new building projects, a process that has become known as "Bruxellisation." In addition to making it possible for readers to visualize the Brontës' Brussels, MacEwan puts Brontë's descriptions of Belgian life into context, and in this way, disrupts entrenched understandings of her relationship with Brussels and portrayal of its customs and people. Brontë's acerbic descriptions of Belgium in her novels and letters home, her insistence that the national character was cold, selfish, slow-witted, and prone to deceit, have often been dismissed as narrow-minded prejudice. More charitably, they have been read in terms of her personal unhappiness and homesickness while in Brussels and her depression on returning home to find Heger cold and uncommunicative. MacEwan enriches our understanding by placing Brontë's observations in the context of other writers, including William Makepeace Thackeray, Lord Byron, and Charles Baudelaire, who mocked the little capital in similar terms. Brontë's insistence that Villette is a city of spies—a claim that might strike modern readers as farfetched and bigoted—finds some justification in MacEwan's discussion of...

Omani Men's National Dress: Displaying Personal Taste, Asserting National Identity

Omani Men's National Dress: Displaying Personal Taste, Asserting National Identity

Everyday Nationhood and Interaction in the Emirate of Ras al-Khaimah

Emirati identity is often associated with social distance between nationals and non-nationals. This article attempts to show, however, that practices of Emirati nationhood mirror the ambivalence of modernity: while assumptions about nationhood and social distance resonate with everyday perceptions, they are locally and individually negotiated, and sometimes they are even obliterated. Drawing on fieldwork in the Emirate of Ras al-Khaimah, the argument comes in three steps. First, the article surveys scholarship that invokes assumptions about nationality and social distance. Second, it shows how the story about Emirati identity and social distance is negotiated during National Day in 2013 and in the wearing of national dress. Third, the article investigates how everyday nationhood and social distance emerge together on a daily but overlooked basis in the dominant form of public interaction: namely, on the road.

National Dress in the UAE: Constructions of Authenticity

It is easy to assume that national dress as it exists today was an integral part of people’s lives in the pre-oil era, and that this historical connection is the reason that many khaleeji citizens often hold on to it so dearly. However, this Quick Study will argue that the national dress represented as part of deeply rooted history and culture in the UAE is constructed and that the dishdasha and ʿabaya are not as authentic as commonly portrayed.

Indian Fashion, Tradition, Innovation, Style

What is Indian fashion? The general response to such a question is likely to mention the sari as national dress and ornate Indian wedding attire but little between or beyond that. Texts on non-west...

Investigating Markers of Authenticity: The Weavers’ Perspective Insights from a Study on Bhutanese Hand-woven Kira Textiles

In spite of recent changes in technology, skills, materials, production, design and marketing that have impacted on traditional Bhutanese hand-woven 'kiras' (the traditional national dress for Bhutanese women), the textile today still remains essentially ‘Bhutanese’. Through engaging with the weaving community to understand and identify the markers of authenticity of Bhutanese hand-woven kira textiles, this study aims to answer the question what makes a kira, a kira? By examining the responses of weavers and observing a wide range of kiras worn, the findings are analyzed through various theories of authenticity. This study proposes that physical markers of authenticity of hand-woven kira textiles are to be found in a framework comprising the weaver’s intention, the cultural context and the psyche of Bhutanese society.

Making a Difference: Sartorial Practices and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century Sweden

This article focuses on the seventy-three essays that were submitted to the Swedish Royal Patriotic Society in 1773, in response to a competition for the best essay on the advantages and disadvantages of a national dress. When presenting their thoughts on the design and realization of a national dress, the authors came to reflect on deeper issues of social order and sartorial culture, describing their views on society and its constituent parts, as well as the trappings of visual appearances. Clothes were an intricate part of the visual culture surrounding early modern social hierarchies; differentiation between groups and individuals were readily visualized through dress. Focusing on the three primary means for visual differentiation identified in the essays — colour, fabrics and forms — this article explores the governing notions of hierarchies in regards to sartorial appearance, and the sartorial practices for making the social order legible in late eighteenth-century Sweden.

Suceava On Camera: The County Council And Local Self-Identification In 21st Century Romania

Abstract In post-communist Romania, regional self-identification has undergone significant change. Particularly, a paradigm shift occurred in relation to 20th century Romanian historiography (I have in mind the national communist as well as inter-war historic narratives). The literature and the promotional films of Suceava County Council (i.e., the local government branch) are a case in point. They are designed to advertise tourism products in travel marts and various media outlets. Next to the story of a multi-faith/ethnic community, particular images and symbols are employed in order to craft the public identity of the county. A regional iconography gradually emerges on screen as more video content about Suceava is being produced. Capturing the essence of Romanian Bucovina on camera is a challenge steeped both in the history of the Habsburg Duchy and in that of the Moldavian principality (whose northernmost part was incorporated into the Habsburg Empire in 1775). Next comes the attempt to ‘touristify’ natural sites of environmental interest. History and nature are narrative tropes that amount to a coherent story delivered to natives and visitors alike. Despite the industrial scarring of the landscape well known to the natives, areas of woodland and countryside are on display. City life is largely ignored for the sake of a multicultural history of Bukovina mainly located in a rural setting. Screening Suceava has everything to do with identity-building. The rhetoric of regional self-designation seems to rank high on the local political agenda. The cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian Bukovinian identity is obviously at odds with the ethno-national legacy celebrated in the so-called ‘Northern monasteries’ of Moldavia or in the Suceava fortress of Stephen the Great (who was built into an icon of Romanian historiography). The recreational opportunities of Suceava County are marketed to tourist boards, hotel chains, etc. as the retention of a Mitteleuropean distinctiveness. Explicitly, it is ‘something’ that has stayed with the indigenous population ever since the Austrian state set out to instruct the natives in the arts of life. There is a video side effect to the story. The mountainous countryside of Suceava is sold to the public as being peopled by men and women in national dress, a community dramatically different from all other surrounding areas of 21st century Romania.

“Culture” a Panacea for Brand Survival: Feasibility Analysis of Zimbabwe Tourism Destination

The study investigated culture as one the strategies that can be used to enhance survival of Zimbabwe tourism brand. This is because like other African tourism destinations, Zimbabwe is rich in unique traditional culture but failing to improve its global tourism brand identity. The study was based on a mixed methods research design combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches in collecting data from respondents. The qualitative method was used to find out the most crucial variables that contribute to culture identity in Zimbabwe tourism destination. This was done through in-depth interviews with the experts and managers in the tourism industry. The responses showed that the most common sources of culture identity are beliefs and norms, national dress code, galleries and heritage, originality in values and language. These variables were then investigated on their effect to Zimbabwe tourism destination branding using survey questionnaires as quantitative research instruments. The respondents for the questionnaires were from the travel sector, accommodation sector, resorts, Ministry of Tourism and Hospitality, Zimbabwe Tourism Authority, Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Environment. The results of the study show that national dress code is the most important source for Zimbabwe tourism cultural branding followed by galleries and heritages and originality in values. The study therefore recommended these three as the most core source for branding Zimbabwe tourism destination using culture. The other variables which are language, beliefs and norms have been regarded as supporting cultural factors and a model was designed to show the relationships.

Patients' attitudes toward the attire of male physicians: a single-center study in Saudi Arabia.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVESThe doctor–patient relationship has been influenced by the appearance of physicians, and there is an association between a physician’s physical appearance and the patients’ initial perceptions of physician competence. This study aims to explore patients’ preferences toward the attire of a male physician, and to examine if a physician’s choice of uniform influences the degree of trust, confidence, and follow-up care among respondents.DESIGN AND SETTINGSA cross-sectional survey conducted among patients of the Alwazarat family medicine center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.PATIENTS AND METHODSA self-administered questionnaire was completed by 300 patients (50% were male and 83.6% had received a secondary education; the mean age was 33.4 [10.1] years) in the Alwazarat family medicine center in Riyadh. The questionnaire was also customized for the local setting with the inclusion of photos of a male doctor in Saudi Arabian national costume, and 3 other dress styles (Western dress with white coat, scrubs with white coat, and scrubs only).RESULTSOverall, across all questions regarding physician dress style preferences, participants significantly preferred Western dress (39.9%, P<.001), followed by Saudi national dress (26.3%), a scrub suit with a white coat (22.3%), and scrubs only (11.5%). Respondents reported that they were more likely to follow medical advice and would return for follow-up care if a physician wore Western dress. They were significantly more willing to share their social, sexual, and psychological problems with a physician wearing Saudi national dress (P<.001). The importance of a physician’s appearance was ranked significantly higher by older patients (P=.002).CONCLUSIONRespondents were more likely to favor a physician wearing Western attire with a white coat. However, Saudi national dress, followed by Western dress, is the preferred attire when physicians are dealing with social, sexual, and psychological problems.

The underside of the undershirt: Australian masculine identity and representations of the undershirt in the ‘Chesty Bond’ comic-strip advertisements

Abstract This article considers the male undershirt within discourses of distinctive Australian national dress styles, bush wear and swimwear. Through the case study of Chesty Bonds advertisements, this article will argue that the undershirt became a symbol of strength, virility, heroicism and mateship during the 1940s and 1950s. In aligning the Chesty Bond character with iconic Australian heroic types the surf lifesaver and the bushman advertisers were able to draw on mythologies of masculine cultural identity to promote the undershirt as a staple of the hegemonic male wardrobe. Through an analysis of the Chesty Bond comic-strip advertisements, I will argue that the athletic undershirt contributed to discourses of national identity in which the white male was dominant, and women and non-Anglo-Celtic men were marginalized, seen as being outside the Australian archetype.

Encyclopedia of National Dress: Traditional Clothing around the World

Encyclopedia of National Dress: Traditional Clothing around the World

Encyclopedia of national dress: traditional clothing around the world

Encyclopedia of national dress: traditional clothing around the world

Ciencia, Arte e Ilusión en la España Ilustrada by Jesusa Vega (review)

Reviewed by: Ciencia, Arte e Ilusión en la España Ilustrada by Jesusa Vega Alisa Luxenberg Jesusa Vega, Ciencia, Arte e Ilusión en la España Ilustrada (Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 2010). Pp. 528, illus. 296. €75.00. Jesusa Vega’s latest book explores how artistic and scientific invention interfaced in Enlightenment Spain. It is a valuable contribution to the scholarly discourse on the art–science dialogue, especially concerning the pivotal role attributed to the eighteenth century in bringing these two disciplines into the public arena and the modern era. Landmark studies include those by art historians, such as Barbara Maria Stafford’s Voyage into Substance: art, science, nature, and the illustrated travel account 1760–1840 (1984), Martin Kemp’s The Science of Art (1990), and Susan Dackerman’s Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (2011), as well as those by historians of science, including Pamela H. Smith’s The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (2004) and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity (2007). What distinguishes Vega’s book, however, is its focus on a single culture and century, thereby redressing the peripheral place often assigned to Spain in investigations of Enlightenment culture and the isolation of such achievements to the reign of Charles III (1759–1788) or to specialized practices like botanical expeditions and illustration. While contextualizing [End Page 81] Spanish participation in Enlightenment ideas and practices, Vega also indicates when its cultural circumstances or attitudes differed. For example, she notes that optical views did not have a popular audience in Spain as they did in England or France, probably because their production was dominated by the royal art academy, making them more of a luxury item. Furthermore, she acknowledges that wealthy and learned Spaniards were less likely to undertake a Grand Tour than were their European counterparts. A widely published historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish art, Vega has considerable expertise in printmaking, national dress, and travel that informs this ambitious study in sometimes unexpected but utterly convincing ways. She has organized a potentially overwhelming array of conceptual, textual, and visual evidence into a clear and coherent argument. Deeply committed to material culture, she presents a judicious but copious selection of objects and visual images, and critically analyzes and integrates each one into her argument. The same is true of the substantial excerpts she cites from eighteenth-century texts on scientific devices and demonstrations. Since many of these sources are little known, Vega provides an important service, and allows her readers to evaluate the original rhetoric for themselves. Vega begins by explaining that she originally set out to write a history of Spanish photography. However, questions about the medium’s illusionistic power, as well as its combination of chemistry, optical devices, and visual aesthetics, soon led her to reorient her project toward earlier, broader cultural developments in these three areas. Her book sets the historical and conceptual stage for the new medium in Spain, not unlike Geoffrey Batchen’s Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997) does for it in Europe, but with more grounding in material culture. Demonstrating that the visual arts and sciences in this crucial period often shared the same audiences, means of expression, and aesthetic tastes—sometimes even the same instruments—she finds it even more curious that art historians and historians of science have worked so separately for so long. Her overarching argument posits that the visual arts and sciences collaborated to birth “a new visual culture [that] redefined what it meant to see and what there was to see” (219). The first part, “Science,” presents the men, institutions, commercial applications, and new urban social practices through which scientific and technological knowledge was created and disseminated. Vega’s discussions of the eighteenth-century concept of “taste” and the modern one of “sociability” are paragons of informed and measured interpretation, linking the arts and sciences through these vehicles of public discourse. One salient point is how the image of the scientist, or “natural philosopher” as he was then called, changed during the 1700s, from a man dependent on mechanical instruments to one who controlled and even invented them. By comparing...

Introduction

Introduction Bruce Boehrer This issue of JEMCS marks the start of the journal’s thirteenth year of publication and its second year as a quarterly issued by the University of Pennsylvania Press. To see the year in, we offer a range of articles dealing with transnational encounters, witchcraft and occult lore, and material culture in its various manifestations. Two articles, from Deborah Willis and Julia M. Garrett, respectively, revisit the particular forms of knowledge associated with witchcraft in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England: Willis focuses on the discourse of the family while Garrett looks closely at the links between sexuality and witchcraft. For Willis, the witch-lore of early modern England lends new attention to the familial context of witchcraft, constructing fantasies whereby witches use family relationships to pass occult knowledge from generation to generation in a parodic inversion of conventional family ties. This caricature of regular family relations then becomes secondarily available as a model for the ostensibly dysfunctional families of the underclass—subversive families made up of beggars, criminals, or rebels. Where Willis thus views witch-lore as contributing to the formation of discourses on the family, Garrett presents this same subject matter as implicated in the history of sexuality. For Garrett, witchcraft provides a frame for the discursive exploration of feminine sexual pleasure. In particular, the physical anomalies associated with witch-proceedings—as for instance the witch’s mark or teat popularly supposed to distinguish the bodies of women who had intimate conjunction with the devil or demonic familiars—offer a material context for thinking about feminine sexuality and erotic satisfaction. On a broader level, Garrett’s article argues that witch-lore and witch-proceedings helped develop a legitimate official discourse of sexuality through their association with legal authority. [End Page 1] Further articles deal with exchanges in the realm of material culture. John R. Ziegler’s “Irish Mantles, English Nationalism: Apparel and National Identity in Early Modern English and Irish Texts” concentrates on the single item of clothing that became perhaps the most potent symbol of Irish cultural integrity in the early modern period. In English colonialist discourse, the Irish mantle came to be associated with sexual promiscuity, nudity, the collapse of social difference, and cross-cultural exoticism more generally. As a result, English efforts to domesticate the Irish tended to focus in large part on sartorial reformation—a reformation enacted symbolically by Ben Jonson’s Irish Masque at Court. Ironically, however, contemporary Irish sources betray little of this concern over national dress, perhaps because contemporary Irish culture was itself not so heavily dependent upon emergent discourses of race and nationhood. Continuing the focus on material culture, Bret Rothstein’s “Strange Wooden Objects and the Early Modern Pursuit of Difficulty” conducts a sustained close reading of a particularly resistant object: a nameless wooden helical torus of unknown manufacture located in the Wunderkammer of Rudolf II, Archduke of Tirol. As Rothstein works his way through the possible meanings and purposes of this item, he moves from questions of practical utility through the categories of mathematical puzzles, wondrous artifacts, impossible objects, and experiments in perspective and anamorphosis. Over the course of this disquisition, the torus itself comes to embody a fascination with the difficulty that lies behind the emergence of mental challenges and visual tricks as a distinct class of commodity whose value resides precisely in a kind of mute resistance: their refusal to deliver up their secrets to the viewer. Finally, Peter C. Remien studies the effects of broadening market activity on the estate poetry of seventeenth-century England. Focusing upon the verse of Robert Herrick and Mildmay Fane, Remien presents Fane’s poem “A Peppercorn or Small Rent” as representative of the generic innovation made possible by the development of global trade networks. Thus Fane’s poem rehearses the transition from notions of the preindustrial household as a unit defined by economic self-sufficiency to models of the modern estate as an institution organized primarily around modes of consumption. In this respect it paves the way for the pastoral-imperial mode of eighteenth-century estate poems like Pope’s “Windsor Forest.” As these articles shift their focus from social practice and religious belief to the histories...

Vestido, identidad y folklore. La invención de un &lt;i&gt;vestido nacional&lt;/i&gt; de Guinea Ecuatorial

Focussing on clothing viewed as a body practice, this paper attempts to provide an ethnographic overview through the examination of the creation of the national dress of Equatorial Guinea. With a discussion of the importance of the personal motivation of its promoters, the reasons for its alleged failure and the recent attempts in current fashion shows in Malabo to (re)produce identity discourses, this paper also seeks to demonstrate the capacity of dress as a tool for social control, resistance and identity (re)creation.