National Costume versus Civilized Dress?

Forth emphasized that one strategy which served to reconstruct masculinity, morally as well as corporally, and thus, counter the perceived threat to male power by modernity, was nationalism.¹¹⁷ In the construction of national identity, engagement with clothing and consumption were pivotal. Sumptuary regulations, as we have seen applied to the Fez in chapter three, were not just a premodern phenomenon but stood also at the wake of modernity.¹¹⁸ An aspect of the appearance of the dandy was his association with cosmopolitanism.¹¹⁹ He appeared in the cosmopolitan quarters of the cities.

Cosmopolitanism was associated with the anti-national, and thus the effeminate was also the anti-national.¹²⁰ Nationalism was not only a dominant paradigm of the period,¹²¹ or at least some kind of proto-nationalism, but was also to become the main cure for the colonial threat.

When the claim to equality made by the appearance of South and West African elites dressed as British ladies and gentlemen did not lead to recognition, some West African countries turned to sartorial nationalism. So did anglophone West Africa adopt lose cotton robes instead of British style suits. These were promoted by the Dress Reform

115 Ross, Clothing, 81.

116 Ibid., 81.

117 See Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West, 47. For more about nationalism see Ibid., Chapter 5.

118 As Brändli assesses for the German-speaking world, in the first half of the nineteenth century international fashion was pondered against the establishment of national costume. These discussions, however, disappeared and gave way to the triumph of bourgeois fashionability. See Brändli, Der herrlich biedere Mann, 166.

119 See Elif Bilgin, ‘An Analysis of Turkish Modernity through Discourses of Masculinities’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Middle East Technical Univ., 2004), 105.

120 Keya Anjaria traces the reappearance of the dandy from Ottoman to Turkish Literature in the 1980s and detects thereby a transformation: In her analysis the dandy turns from a upper class traitor of the nationalist cause to a compatriot, who is part of the masses. See Keja Keja Anjaria, ‘The Dandy and the Coup: Politics of Literature in the Post-1980 Turkish Novel, Üç Beş Kişi’, Middle Eastern Literatures 17, no. 3 (2014): 263–82, doi:10.1080/1475262X.2014.997575, 268

121 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised ed. (London [u.a.]: Verso, 2006).

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Society, founded in 1887. Ross noted a “considerable and surprising degree of coincidence between the forms of colonial policy and politics of dress,”¹²² caused by the difference between French and British colonialism, where the French in contrast to the British did not prevent the adoption of European attire and simultaneously offered much easier access to French citizenship.

Also, in Indian's men's dress, a shift occurred, partly as a consequence of experiences that racist prejudices and structures could not be overcome simply by an adaptation of British appearance and behavior. Tarlo pointed out that even though the British colonizer attempted to orientalize their Indian subjects and prevent the adoption of Western dress, also numerous anti-colonial activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century opposed its adoption and pejoratively labeled it as imitation. They instead issued calls to wear swadeshi (Indian made) cloth.¹²³ The first efforts to (re-)define Indian dress appeared in the 1870s, namely with Jyndirindranath Tagore's attempts to employ dress as a starting point for political change. The aim was to appear respectable without becoming European, and it comprised the invention of a national costume out of the vast variety of Indian dress.¹²⁴

This first attempt to create a sense of political unity through dress as part of an anti-colonial struggle remained singular and did not find wide acceptance. Only in 1905, after the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, announced the partition of Bengal, a first collective movement of the rejection of European dress emerged. The dhothi, a waist-clothe for men, worn draped, folded and tucked became the symbol of this struggle, which also entailed the boycott and burning of foreign cloth. It remained nevertheless a regional struggle, and from 1910 onwards many men returned to European or semi-European clothes. The choice of dress remained a “private problem” and not a central point of public debate until the appearance of M.K. Ghandi.¹²⁵ In terms of headgear, the British colonial sola topi was countered by the Ghandian cap during the struggle for national independence. Many times these headpieces, such as other national symbols and clothes, were cases of invented traditions. So was a black cap worn in Java, called Peci, derived from Dutch petje, which became a sign of anti-colonial nationalist attitude and

122 Ross, Clothing, 136.

123See Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 11.

124 See Ibid., 58.

125 See Ibid., 60-61.

4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress adopted by the elites to demonstrate solidarity with the masses.¹²⁶

Postcolonial nationalisms employed various sartorial strategies. European pieces were adopted selectively piece by piece, or mixed styles appeared that combined assumed national or traditional styles with European pieces of dress. In his case studies of Indian and Indonesian nationalism Ross concluded that “the wearing of European dress by prominent Indian and Javanese men was the beginning, though not necessarily the end of anti-colonial nationalism.”¹²⁷ Forms of disciplining the population through dress already employed by the missionaries were adopted by nationalist elites in postcolonial nationalist movement and states. Efforts to bring “backward” people up to date came along with the promotion of particular forms of behavior and social engineering. The restrictions imposed by European colonial laws to the wearing of Western dress generated certain acts of resistance such as the wearing of top hats in church as a claim to equality with the colonizers in the region of today's Botswana and Namibia.¹²⁸

The fashion-obsessed dandy became a figure of the anti-national. Specifically, but not only in non-Western countries, he became the imitator of the foreign and thus fitted perfectly into the rhetoric of the degraded urban male who needed to be reintegrated into the nation in order to strengthen the national collective.¹²⁹ Even in Russia this process of terming the appropriation of ready-made clothes by lower rural classes as dandyism occurred, thus limiting the possibility of social mobility or equality that might accompany the appropriation of a certain style of dress.¹³⁰ In terms of nationalist dress,

126 Whereas Thailand's government ordered the wearing of hats in the streets by men in 1940, leading to the establishment of hat hiring for those who did not posses one, in case of the appearance of the police. See Ross, Clothing, 111.

127 Ibid., 79.

128 See Ibid., 102.

129 The dandy was a present trope in many countries, i.e. also in Russian satire and plays he became a common figure. See Christine Ruane, The Empire’s New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry, 1700 - 1917 (New Haven [u.a.]: Yale Univ. Press, 2009), 152.

130 See Ibid., 75. Actually the Russian Empire under Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century had been the site of a very early example of state introduced modernization of dress. After his return from a journey in western Europe Peter the Great of Russia initiate d a dress reform by a decree that required the Muscovite population to wear “German dress.” He also ordered men in his vicinity, with some exceptions, to shave their beards. Peter' s Decree on Wearing German Clothes from 1701 read as follows: “[All ranks of the service nobility, leading merchants, military personnel, and inhabitants of Moscow and the other towns, except the clergy] are to wear German clothes and hats and footwear and to ride in German saddles; and their wives and children without exception are also so to dress. Henceforth nobody is to wear [traditional] Russian or Cossacks clothes or to ride in Russian [i.e., Tatar-style] saddles;

nor are craftsmen to make such things or to trade in them. And if contrary to this the Great Sovereign's decree some people wear such Russian or cossack clothes and ride in Russian saddles, the town gatekeepers are to exact a fine from them, [so much] for those on foot and [much more] from those on horseback. Also, craftsmen who make such things and trade in them will be, for their disobedience, severely punished.” And

4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress

tsar Alexander III also used headgear as a sign of distinction by the introduction of kind of papakha, or kalpak, in 1881.¹³¹

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century Forth depicts three, interconnected metamorphoses which had an impact on the male body.¹³² The first was the Social Darwinist discourse that vacillated between the praise of evolutionary progress of Western society versus fears of physical degeneration coming along with its civilization. The second was a change in the social composition of the middle class, in which members of lower classes claimed bourgeois status and privileges. For this upward social mobility dress and other consumer items became pivotal props for the appropriation of a respectable masculinity. The last point was an enforced engagement with bodily exercise, especially of the lower middle classes as a compensation for ostensible effeminacy.

In colonial societies under direct colonial rule the local dandy’s position and his endeavours for social enhancement through the adoption of modern dress were more obvious. Rudolf Mrazek scrutinized the appearance of the Indonesian dandy at the beginning of the twentieth century: “The newly born native dandy was a 'native' who borrowed Dutch clothes to place himself in a 'modern' colonial society.”¹³³

Since dress in the colonies was an important sign of distinction, the appropriation of European colonialists dress by colonial subjects could question colonial domination and white superiority and claims to dominance. At first, Dutch colonialism used and interpreted this acculturation in a different way: as a method to 'tame' the 'wild native' who threatened Dutch dominance, which proved successful in this way. In the course of time

this is Peter's Decree on Shaving of 1705: “All courtiers and officials in Moscow and all the other towns, as well as leading merchants and other townsmen, except priests and deacons, must henceforth by this the Great Sovereign's decree shave their beards and moustaches. And whosoever does not wish to do so, but to go about with [traditional Russian] beard and moustache, is to pay a [hefty] fine, according to his rank.

[...] And the Department of Land Affairs [in Moscow] is to give [such persons] a badge in receipt, as will the government offices in the other towns, which badges they must wear. And from the peasants a [small]

toll is to be exacted every day at the town gates, without which they cannot enter or leave the town.” As quoted and translated by James Cracraft “Laws of Peter I,” in James Cracraft, ed., Major Problems in the History of Imperial Russia, Major Problems in European History Series (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1994), 110-111; on these reforms see also Ruane, The Empire’s New Clothes; and Christine Ruane,

‘Subjects into Citizens: The Politics of Clothing in Imperial Russia’, in Fashioning the Body Politic:

Dress, Gender, Citizenship, ed. Wendy Parkins (New York: Berg, 2002), 49–70.

131 See Ruane, The Empire’s New Clothes, 160.

132See Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West, 143.

133 Rudolf Mrázek, ‘Indonesian Dandy: The Politics of Clothes in the Late Colonial Period, 1893-1942’, in Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia, Proceedings / Koninklijk Instituut Voor Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde 4 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997), 131-132.

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these colonialized subjects formed a new force, especially those who acquired an academic education and resisted being defined and categorized by Dutch colonial rulers.¹³⁴ This resulted, in accordance with Brändli's observations of the German-speaking world, in an obsession with cleanliness, discipline and militarized appearance: colonial officers were urged to wear their white, starched ceremonial uniforms even off duty, which meant an enormous effort to keep this uniform in a nice condition.¹³⁵ Mrázek attributed to the practice of Westernization a rebellious character and a revolutionary potential: “Diving into everything Western, and remaining elusive at the same time, demanded the courage of a guerilla fighter.”¹³⁶ His interpretation of the dandy is the reverse of his depiction of a coward who submits to Western colonial dominance, as was done by late Ottoman authors.