Illustrated with more than 300 color photographs, including many details and back views, What Clothes Reveal treats not only elegant, high-style clothing in colonial America but also garments for everyday and work, the clothing of slaves, and maternity and nursing apparel.".

A fascinating account of the trade patterns and consumption practices that arose following European colonisation of the Atlantic world. Focusing on textiles and clothing, Robert DuPlessis reveals how globally sourced goods shaped the material existence of virtually every group in the Atlantic basin during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

What would you have worn if you lived during the American Revolution or the early 1800s? It depends on who you were! Women wore layers and layers of undergarments, including corsets, chemises, and petticoats, and they accessorized with gloves, hats, parasols, and fans. Men also flaunted plenty of accessories, including neckties, top hats, walking sticks, and pocket watches. Read more about Revolutionary and early 1800s fashions—from pantaloons to silk stockings to tricornered hats—in this fascinating book!

"In the second half of the nineteenth century, the influence of missionaries, traders and immigrants in what became German South-West Africa led to the adoption by the Herero of the European dress of the day: floor-length gowns, Western-style suits and hats, and military uniforms. Following the terrible German-Herero war of 1904-08 and the end of German colonial rule in 1915, the dresses and uniforms - including those of killed or departed German soldiers - became central to the rebuilding of Herero cultural identity. In Conflict and Costume, acclaimed photographer Jim Naughten captures the colourful Herero attire in a series of spectacular portraits set against the Namibian landscape." -- Inside dust jacket.

Most of us have no problem reading novels, plays, diaries, or newspapers from the eighteenth century. But speaking eighteenth-century English can be trickier. This series of lessons has been designed to help historical interpreters and reenactors better understand the language of the period and sound more like the persons they portray. Lessons contain grammar, vocabulary, and conversational etiquette for all levels of society.

This volume examines the dynamic relationship between the body, clothing, and identity in sub-Saharan Africa and raises questions that have previously been directed almost exclusively to a Western and urban context. Unusual in its treatment of the body surface as a critical frontier in the production and authentification of identity, Clothing and Difference shows how the body and its adornment have been used to construct and contest social and individual identities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and other African societies during both colonial and post-colonial times. Grounded in the insights of anthropology and history and influenced by developments in cultural studies, these essays investigate the relations between the personal and the public, and between ideas about the self and those about the family, gender, and national groups. They explore the bodily and material creation of the changing identities of women, spirits, youths, ancestors, and entrepreneurs through a consideration of topics such as fashion, spirit possession, commodity exchange, hygiene, and mourning. By taking African societies as its focus, Clothing and Difference demonstrates that factors considered integral to Western social development--heterogeneity, migration, urbanization, transnational exchange, and media representation--have existed elsewhere in different configurations and with different outcomes. With significance for a wide range of fields, including gender studies, cultural studies, art history, performance studies, political science, semiotics, economics, folklore, and fashion and textile analysis/design, this work provides alternative views of the structures underpinning Western systems of commodification, postmodernism, and cultural differentiation. Contributors. Misty Bastian, Timothy Burke, Hildi Hendrickson, Deborah James, Adeline Masquelier, Elisha Renne, Johanna Schoss, Brad Weiss

Everything you need to know about making costumes for plays, pageants, musicals... at minimum expense.