Fashion and the Construction of Race

In the second episode of this miniseries, Portrait of a Young Woman, Erica Moiah James discusses the importance of fashion in understanding this portrait and the life of this woman. She speaks with historian of fashion, Amelia F. Rauser, Charles A. Dana Professor of Art history at Franklin and Marshall College, whose book The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s was critical for Erica’s research.  As Amelia has importantly argued in her text, the “objection of the enslaved Black body and the plantation culture and inhabited, stalked neoclassical dress, which could not escape the material traces of its manufacturer.” Erica’s research on the young Black woman in this portrait draws on Amelia’s work on Caribbean dress, and they will discuss the role that fashion had on the Caribbean and across the Atlantic. In particular, they explore the ways in which women and particularly women of color use fashion to claim power through self-representation.

Transcript

Erica Moiah James 
I am Erica Moiah James, an art historian, curator and associate professor at the 
University of Miami. I was previously the founding director and chief curator of 
the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas when it was founded in July of 2003. 
Over the next five episodes, I will discuss Portrait of a Young Woman and reflect 
on what it means to search for the name of a historical individual in the archive. 
What tools might I, as a contemporary art historian, use to uncover the possible 
history and life of the woman who remains unnamed? In this process, I'm using 
the traditional methods of art history to think about how art history as a 
discipline has historically and structurally made it both difficult to name 
unnamed figures of color within historical portraiture and also has used 
representations of Blackness such as this as evidence for claims to deny the 
presence and vitality of Black life in the early modern world.

I do not know if I will ever find this particular woman in the archive, but in my 
search, I make a claim that this work is both necessary and that it begins to do 
reparative justice within a discipline that has all too frequently settled for 
assuming absence in the archive instead of doing the essential historical work to 
illuminate Black lives.

I'm back with the second episode of our series about the pastel work Portrait of 
a Young Woman. Today I will discuss the importance of fashion in understanding 
this portrait and the life of this woman. I will also talk with historian of fashion 
Amelia F. Rauser, Charles A. Dana Professor of Art history at Franklin and 
Marshall College, whose book The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical 
Ideal in the 1790s was critical for my work. As Amelia has importantly argued in 
her text, the “abjection of the enslaved Black body and the plantation culture 
and inhabited, stalked neoclassical dress, which could not escape the material 
traces of its manufacturer.”

My research on the young Black woman in this portrait draws on Amelia's work 
on Caribbean dress, and we will discuss the role that fashion had on the 
Caribbean and across the Atlantic, and the ways in which women and particularly 
women of color use fashion to claim power through self-representation. 
In terms of my own research for naming this unnamed sitter, I followed Roshini
Kempadoo’s directive and began to explore her geographic specificity to the
Caribbean—or what I believed at the time was her geographic specificity to the 
Caribbean—and through legacies of women's fashion and resistance. 
The sitter's dress would not be unusual, since, as Amelia Rauser argues, it is this 
style of plantation dress that influenced later neoclassical styles in France,
popularized by two Caribbean-born influencers, Fortunée Hamelin, born to sugar 
planters on Saint-Domingue, and Joséphine de Beauharnais, future wife of 
Napoleon, raised on a sugar plantation at Les Trois-Îlets, Martinique. 
Rauser makes clear that, “the simple round gown of white muslin was in itself a 
West Indian invention, well documented in the paintings by Agostino Brunias of 
Caribbean life.”

What our sitter wears is a slightly embellished version of that round neck 
ensemble. Not stuffy, not ostentatious, easy to move around in, and apparently 
fitted to the body. It suggests that the person she worked for was not royal or 
nouveau rich and hence, possessing the need to dress their Black servants in 
opulence. This is everyday clothing, accessorized with gold or brass earrings and 
a choker made of glass beads—not of pearls, as historians have tended to 
describe it. Her hair is completely covered by a distinctive head tie. If one looks 
carefully, the level of drawing is so detailed that it is apparent that the head tie 
covers another piece of cloth, indicating that she may be a mixed-race woman.
Why do I say this? This is because mixed-race women tended to have straighter 
hair, requiring two layers of cloth of differing densities for head ties. The soft 
quality of the delicate, translucent top with striped detailing suggests that it is a 
swath of silk, linen, or voile. These fabrics would not be able to grasp hair readily, 
requiring an under cloth, upon which to hold the scarf.

Head ties form an incredible indigenous archive in the Caribbean. Historically, 
head ties have been used by Caribbean women to protect hair from debris and 
sweat in the fields; to preserve hairstyles fashioned during limited free time; to 
conceal dirty, wild, disheveled hair; to desexualize the persons that wore them, 
adding a layer of protection against violent sexual attacks or the punishment of 
shorn locks, particularly for those who worked in domestic settings and were 
subject to the whims of jealous or angry mistresses. They also wore them as a 
marker of identity.

One of the most closely studied traditions of head ties as expressive language 
centers on the Dutch Caribbean, where Christopher Burghard Steiner has 
proposed that the use of imported cloth by Saramaka in Suriname was an 
example of “resistance to the dictates of Western regimes of clothing styles.”
But rather than looking at head ties through the overpowering lens of resistance, 
which can recenter the colonial presence as an active force on Black creative 
expression, what might it mean to consider it as an example of self-actualized, 
self-determined, creative Caribbean modernism—even in 1770?

Already a practice among enslaved Black women in the late 18th century, in 
1786, Tignon Laws were enacted by the Spanish governor Esteban Rodríguez 
Miró, in Louisiana, barring free Black and mixed-race women from exposing their 
hair publicly. Free women of color across the Caribbean took a law that was 
meant to control the signification of a style of dress that slave women had 
created and transformed it into a politicized art form that dramatically 
distinguished them. Free women of color used the head tie to mark—or perhaps 
a better word is choose—Blackness, even in cases where under certain 
conditions, they presented visually as white.

In Suriname, traditional Saramaka dress is called kotomisi, which consists of koto 
dresses and folded head scarves called angisas. Van Putten and Zantinge note 
that, “the first mention of the word ‘angisa’ in colonial archives occurs in a 1788 
Dutch dictionary, where it is said to mean, from the colonial Dutch perspective, 
‘henkertjef,’ or ‘not yet headscarf.’” As Christine van Russel-Henar notes, the 
angisa head tying practice began during slavery and continued long after their 
self-emancipation. However, during slavery, the angisa, or head tie, in her words, 
“made it possible for enslaved women to communicate with one another, 
despite restrictions slaveholders placed on talking among slaves. The patterns on 
the cloth and the manner in which the angisa was folded conveyed coded 
messages that were intelligible only to other slaves,” and free people.

Just as the Saramaka head ties marked history and place, the distinct and 
carefully appointed style of head ties across the region are particular to certain 
places. The same is true for the sitter’s head tie in Portrait of a Young Woman.
I want to turn now to a different painting. I'm quite certain it's a different painter 
than the artist who drew our portrait. It is the Italian painter Agostino Brunias, 
who arrived in the Caribbean in the 1760s, beginning a remarkable series of 
paintings that in many ways have an ethnographic function in their 
documentation of race, racial mixture, dress, cultures, and traditions of the nonwhite populations on the islands of Dominica, Barbados, and elsewhere.
A few of his works help to place our Portrait of the Young Woman in the 
Caribbean. For example, in Brunias’s The Handkerchief Dance, the central figure 
wears the same head tie as the Saint Louis Art Museum's unknown woman. Set 
on the island of Dominica, an island at various times claimed by France, Spain, 
and Britain, she not only wears a scarf tied in exact same way, but is pictured 
wearing a similar glass choker and gold or brass earrings.

It is unknown whether this style of head tie had special meaning or was simply 
the prevailing fashion of these islands at the time. However, based on what the 
material and social archive affirms, it definitively marks our unknown woman as 
a Caribbean person in 18th century Europe. She's most likely a mixed-race Black 
woman from Dominica, or Saint-Domingue, who, for personal reasons, continued 
to wear her native style of dress while in France, and while there, sat for a noted 
artist.

Please join me now as I speak with Amelia Rauser about the history of fashion in 
the Caribbean and the ways in which this woman's dress speaks about larger 
histories of maritime commerce, trade, the legacy of slavery, and the power of 
fashion to articulate the rights of the individual over their body, self, and 
freedom.

I really loved your work on fashion, especially as a non-paper archive. I was really 
fascinated by your argument that countered the perceived rigidity of 
Neoclassicism and returned our regard to the body and the flesh, but also, I think 
the way you recenter the creativity and taste of women, particularly women 
from the Caribbean. I mean, your work is expansive, but of course, when I saw 
that Fortunée Hamelin and Josephine were included and that you tied it to the 
Caribbean, all my senses, all my senses peaked. And I just wanted you to start by 
telling us a bit about your research journey to the Caribbean and how you use 
fashion. Do you think of dress as a kind of archive?

Amelia Rauser
Well, I've always been fascinated by how more ordinary people were able to 
participate in aesthetic culture to express themselves as artists, or even to just 
participate as regular people, but in the sort of aesthetic moment that they were 
born into or lived through.

So, as you know, art historians tend to focus a lot on kings and popes and the 
artworks that they patronize. And those are fabulous, wonderful artworks that 
are often among the most innovative. But regular people also need art and use 
art and participate in an aesthetic realm. And so, I've always looked for ways to 
try to get more of a handle on how art was meaningful and was used 
expressively by people who are lower down the social ladder. So, that sometimes 
means more popular prints or ephemera that people were able to collect. But 
dress is a really important way to do that. Whether we think about it or not 
consciously, or how consciously we allow ourselves to think about it, we're 
participating in the aesthetic of our moment. Just by getting dressed. So, it 
absolutely can provide a window. And of course it is in a way, nothing more 
personal. These are items we wear on our bodies that are nonetheless highly 
expressive, and they say a lot about our identities, not only where we are in in 
the season and in the time of day, but also who we are or who we want to 
project to the world that we are.

Erica Moiah James
Yeah, that's wonderful. And the ways in which your research has connected 
almost across the Atlantic, connected the Caribbean to French culture, elite 
culture, through dress is very compelling. And the way that you bring in the 
working class, the indentured and slave labor, almost talking about—no, I 
wouldn't say almost—you make the argument that I completely agree with that 
the ways in which the enslaved persons on the plantations almost innovated with 
what they had, with the terms of the dress and how that translated to, you know, 
neoclassical dress later in the 18th century was really fascinating. Can you talk a 
little bit about aspects of that? That may seem to be quite a leap for a lot of 
people. But I think your argument is compelling and I would like to hear more 
from you on that.

Amelia Rauser
So, initially what made me realize this connection was following the material 
history of the fabric that was being used by fashionable women in Europe, and 
that was cotton muslin. And trying to understand the trade, the triangular trade 
and the way that that fabric was created, imported, exported, and used, led me 
to realize that as I was looking at some of these portraits of fashionable 
European women, I realized they were wearing banned textiles. They were 
wearing madras textiles that were banned from sale in Europe. These were 
textiles that were used as slave currency to trade for enslaved people in Africa 
and then to clothe enslaved people in the Caribbean, and they were banned in 
Europe from sale in order to protect the domestic textile industry in Europe.
So, what were these European women doing wearing these textiles? What could 
that possibly mean? That realization was the key that helped me to unlock quite 
deep connection between the fashionable and sort of clothing choices of women 
in the Caribbean, both enslaved and free women of color and the Europeans who 
grew up in the Caribbean and the Europeans back in Europe. 

So, I realized that in the 1790s, that precisely the time when, you know, the sort 
of casual understanding is that women were taking after classical Greek 
sculptures and wanting to make themselves into Greek statues, and I definitely 
believe that's a huge part of what they were doing. At the same time, they were 
also consciously appropriating elements of what they viewed as Creole culture of 
the plantation: the white muslin round gown, a loose gown that was really an 
invention of the West Indies that was appropriate for the climate; the care for 
that fabric, which was also a product of the West Indies; bluing it with indigo and 
bleaching it; and the head wrap. The head wrap was worn especially by Madam 
Récamier, she was known for this head wrap.

Erica Moiah James
That's fantastic. Did you get a chance to look at the painting—well, the pastel 
that I'm working with? 

Amelia 
Yes, absolutely. 

Erica Moiah James 
I wondered if I could have the pleasure of hearing your thoughts about it in terms 
of the dress, because the material history, her adornment, has been really 
important to me as a researcher. In a sense, I've almost paralleled your approach 
in terms of looking at fashion and dress and materials as my critical archive. It has 
really helped me, in fact, we've used some of the same resources. Brunias, for 
instance, has been a really important resource for me in terms of placing her as 
possibly being from the island of Dominica or Saint-Domingue just based on the 
design of the head wrap, you know? It's very specific in terms of the Caribbean to 
wear, what kind of tie a person or a population engaged with, you know, or used 
as fashion. And the tie that my young lady is wearing is specific to Dominica and 
Saint-Domingue. Brunias was one of those resources that I noticed that both of 
us draw on, and you speak of cloth in a way that I'm just arriving. Maybe a little 
bit. 

So, I wanted to really draw on your expertise to look at her and to sort of tell me 
your thoughts about the cloth and the dress that she's wearing. I describe it in a 
certain way that meets the capacity of my knowledge and language. But I wanted 
to really hear from you, as an expert on this, what your thoughts were and 
perhaps engage the idea of translucency that you do so well in the book 
regarding her and the head tie, because I interpreted the translucency of her 
double head tie in a racialized manner. But I wanted to see if you had a different 
take on that. 

Amelia Rauser
That's a very interesting question at the end there. Well, when I look at this 
gorgeous pastel portrait, I think what I'm seeing here is quite an interesting 
hybrid of Caribbean and European fashion influences. So, her dress, to me, looks 
like a fairly typical mid-1770s dress. It has a high shoulder, a tight shoulder, and a 
round arm's eye, and a rounded neck with probably some sort of flat frill 
indicated around the neckline. And to me, the pastelist has indicated, you know, 
some color, a little bit of texture to the dress leads me to think it's probably a 
typically European mid-1770s, perhaps silk dress. 

But her headdress is, as you say, definitively Caribbean and the textiles—I agree 
with you, I'm glad you pointed this out, that it seems to have two layers of wrap: 
an under layer, and then this very translucent overlayer. That translucent white 
fabric, that's the top layer, I would say is most likely white muslin, a very, very 
fine translucent muslin. It could be silk—it has a stripe and a check sort of woven 
into it. But it's definitely signifying that typical textile, that typical look of the 
Caribbean, of that floaty white, translucent fabric. And the beautiful way that her 
skin shows through it, right at her hairline, I think is quite striking.

I mean, another important accessory here is her gold earrings, and those hoop 
earrings were very much associated with maritime, the maritime culture, and or 
the island culture of the Caribbean in the minds of Europeans. So, stereotypically 
pirates wore gold hoops, sailors wore gold hoops. These were a style of ear 
decoration that were associated with things close to the sea. And European 
women weren't so much wearing gold hoops at this time. Although, 15 years 
later or so, they would become definitely fashionable and definitely appropriated 
from the Caribbean.

Erica Moiah James
That's fascinating. I started looking at her and thinking about the choices made in 
terms of fashion, the fact that she definitely was a Caribbean person who lived in 
the Caribbean for a while for her to know, you know, that particular tie, you 
know? She wasn't someone who was taken as a child to Europe and was, you 
know, dressed in a European style. She was allowed to retain quite a bit of her 
own cultural signatures through fashion. And I think that says a lot and may give 
some sort of weight to my argument, to be honest. This is pretty exciting. 

Amelia Rauser
Could I add one more thing? Which is, as I was looking at this and thinking about 
the shape of the head tie, as you know, headdresses take a variety of shapes in 
the Caribbean through this part of the century. They might be more flat and 
wide, they might be very, very tall and conical. One thing that strikes me in 
looking at this, that I personally don't know because I haven't investigated it, is 
what the direction of influence is between the high head tie that you see here 
and the high headdress that was fashionable in Europe at exactly the same 
moment.

So, it would've been quite fashionable for a white woman in Europe at this time 
to have a tall sort of Q-tip, style headdress that was her own natural hair, but was 
augmented with a lot of padding and false pieces and so forth to be very, very tall 
and vertical, and often powdered to be rather white looking as well. You know, as 
I look at this young woman, I think, oh, it's interesting that one thing that also 
gives her a sense of hybridity with European and Caribbean fashion is the shape 
of her head tie is similar in silhouette to the shape that would've been 
fashionable for a headdress at the time in Europe. But how do we know that the 
European women weren't actually looking to that silhouette of the head tie as an 
influence? I personally don't know that because I haven't researched it, but I 
know they were looking at it in, you know, only 15 or 20 years later in the 1790s.

Erica Moiah James 
I think you've given me my next research problem. I've looked at European 
headdress but not really thought about it seriously in terms of influence, but 
really trying to ground everything in the Caribbean. And I think it's my research 
responsibility, I think, to do the other side of this, right? So, thank you for that 
prompt. That's a good direction to take things in. 

You do a wonderful job even thinking about racialization in Europe. I was looking 
at some of the visual culture you draw on that tends to be ignored in art history. 
But here you are really drawing on this to make some really compelling 
arguments. I would like to hear from you specifically about how race was read in 
the late 18th century. And how that played into representations, not necessarily 
in fine art, but in visual culture.

Amelia Rauser
Yeah, it's a really, really fluid time for racial formation in European thought in the 
late 18th century. On the one hand, there's an idea that's relevant earlier that 
says, you know, your race is sort of determined by the climate you're living in and 
the location, and it is changeable and there are elements in, you know, European 
popular plays and prints that make jokes about people turning one race or 
another as they move between places. On the other hand, there's a growing field 
of scientific race science at the end of the 18th century that is arguing much 
more for fixed types, and that is also becoming more dominant in the culture.
So, as these very different notions are collapsing into one another, encountering 
one another, individual people are grappling with them in different ways, and 
you definitely can see that in the way that fashion is used in this period. On the 
one hand, the white woman is making herself even more definitively white by 
contrasting herself in some cases to the enslaved women. So, you've got two 
women wearing the same gown, and it makes their distinctive skin color even 
more visible. But on the other hand, there's still that element of fluidity and selfconstruction, and there's that enlightenment sense of what is natural and what is good that both women and people of color are picking up on to try to advance 
themselves.

So, what I mean by that is that both women and people of color are attributed in 
this period with being close to nature, with being more unschooled, perhaps 
more unlearned, and that in this sort of new Rousseauean way of looking at 
things, that could be conceived of as a positive, and both women and people of 
color sort of draw on that little thread, that little opening, to reframe the way 
they're being seen in European culture, and they use fashionable dress to do 
that.

Erica Moiah James
Was there ever a discussion about the racial identity of Joséphine de Beauharnais
being from the Caribbean? 

Amelia Rauser
Yes, so especially de Beauharnais is often described as dark-skinned. She's 
described negatively as if she is a dark-skinned or mixed-race person in many 
popular accounts. There are also portrayals of her, portraits, that seem to, well, 
depending which one you look at, trying to either be ambiguous about her racial 
identity or sort of definitively paint her as white. The funny thing is too, is that 
the Creoleness of these two women was not only in their possibility of being 
mixed-race, it was, again, this older notion of malleability and changeability that 
by having grown up in this place, they were to some sense, non-white no matter 
what they looked like.

Erica Moiah James 
Thank you for joining us today as we discuss the subtleties of fashion and dress 
across the 18th century Caribbean, and to understand what we can learn about 
this unnamed woman through her choice of dress. In our next episode, we will 
talk with Oliver Wunsch about the technique of pastel in order to better 
understand the materiality of the portrait and think about how identifying the 
artists of the portrait might help us to better understand the sitter's identity.
Thank you for joining me in this process of discovery.

Caro Fowler 
Thank you for listening to In the Foreground Conversations on Art and Writing. 
For more information and links to the resources referenced in this episode, 
please visit clarkart.edu/rap/podcast. The Clark's Research and Academic 
Program would like to thank Erica Moiah James for her collaborative role in 
crafting this special iteration of the podcast.

In the foreground was co-created and produced by Caroline Fowler and Caitlin 
Woolsey, with editing by Caitlin Woolsey and Chase Bradshaw, sound mixing by 
CJ DeGennaro, an additional support from Shawnette Smalls and Noelle Derksen. 
Our intro music is by lightchaser and the music excerpts used in this special 
season are by Tomas Aquino and Maria Isabel Trinidad from the Smithsonian 
Folkways compilation Music from the Dominican Republic Volume 2, The Island of 
Espanola, released by Folkways Records in 1976, with more details about the 
songs featured available on our podcast webpage.

The Clark Art Institute sits on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people. 
We acknowledge the tremendous hardship of their forcible removal from its 
homelands by the colonial settlers, a federally recognized nation. They now 
reside in Wisconsin and are known as the Stockbridge-Munsee community. As we 
learn, speak, and gather at the Clark, we pay honor to their ancestors past and 
present, and to future generations by committing to build a more inclusive and 
equitable space for all.