BuYun Chen, Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China

Abstract

substantial income. The third chapter considers the sixteenth century, when the exaggerated court dress characteristic of the European early baroque was informed by Ottoman traditions of layering shirts, coats and sleeves. Highly particularised headgear makes for satisfying visual comparisons. In this chapter and the following, Jirousek shows the impact of entertainment; costumes from operas set in the Islamic world helped spread ideas about dress, whether based in reality or imagination. The fourth chapter focuses on changes in the seventeenth century, especially the shift from tightly corseted silhouettes to more relaxed and less formal modes of dress — many of their elements kaftan-like. It also points out the role of the Ottoman army; even some women’s garments incorporated the more picturesque elements of Ottoman uniforms as depicted in prints and paintings. The eighteenth century brought a wealth of oil paintings depicting Ottoman costume in Istanbul itself, some worn by locals and some by visitors to the Empire, the subject of the fifth chapter. Women’s headgear remains a salient borrowed feature, but at this point, too, Ottomania was being overtaken by chinoiserie and an equal fascination with South Asia. Exoticisms competed. The last chapter and postscript consider the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The industrial revolution, the advent of mass production and mass fashion, and the availability of ready-made garments all helped spur a sea change in dress. Ottoman elements, like fezzes, were all the more valued for their picturesquerie. By this point, too, earlier European styles were being revived and, with them, the Ottoman elements they had already incorporated. The confections of L eon Bakst and early Hollywood costume design emphasise again the role of performance. The book is lavishly illustrated in colour; many images have lengthy and helpful captions. A brief glossary is also useful, as is a more comprehensive index. The illustrations include only a very few of the surviving garments from the periods and categories in question — dress survives poorly. For this reason, Jirousek relies on prints, paintings, the odd sculpture and photography and film for the later period — these are the best and sometimes only sources. Their limitations as evidence, and their dissemination, might be an area for further research: how did women in sixteenth-century Brittany, for instance, come to wear hats resembling the borks worn by janissaries (the Sultan’s cadre of elite soldiers)? Could a print communicate colour, material and texture, as well as form? These questions remain open, though perhaps impossible to answer. The tricky-to-define relationship between the Ottomans and Europe, in geography and historiography, also highlights further questions. Should Ottoman dress be considered a subcategory of European dress, and therefore written back into European histories? Or is it more useful to see exchange between two (or more) somewhat distinct civilisations? The answer probably lies somewhere in between and the book goes a long way towards illustrating the significant debt owed by European fashion to that of its Eastern neighbour.